Metamorphosis
by EndOfAbraxas
Summary: A chance encounter with a familiar-looking girl leaves Sei questioning the one thing she was most sure of, and leaves Yumi completely stunned at a bizarre turn of events. An exploration of the ambiguity of soeur relationships and romantic relationships in general, with a particularly close look at Sei/Yumi, Yumi/Sachiko, and...a slightly unusual pairing.
1. Chapter 1: The Whole Story

**Chapter 1: The Whole Story**

Yumi put her hand over her eyes, to block out the few sun rays that were peeking through the clouds. The sky was almost completely covered in a thick blanket of off-white, but what little sun was shining through felt brighter than normal. It looked like it was about to pour at any moment, the clouds getting grayer by the second.

"The rainy season is just about here," she mumbled to herself. She walked along a familiar little concrete path, one that brought back a lot of memories, especially considering the time of year. All the while, she tried to suppress the mental image of her 16-year-old self bursting into tears and melodramatically running through the rain years ago, when she thought her onee-sama had been "cheating" on her with Touko.

 _Those were simpler times,_ she thought with some amusement—though there was a small twinge of pain there for some reason still.

Eventually, she could see her destination up ahead, a place she had neglected for awhile. _It's been at least a few months since I've checked on the rosa chinensis patch. I hope they survived the winter._

Of course, she wasn't going to the greenhouse just to look at the roses. As had been her habit in high school, she occasionally stopped by when she needed to think and decompress. So many important things had happened in that greenhouse, that it always gave her comfort to just sit there and reminisce, and think about how far she had come since those days. She was eager to spend a few moments alone and—

As she opened the door of the old greenhouse with a creak, she caught sight of the unmistakable shape of a human figure sitting near the back. At first she sighed, a little disappointed, but peering through the overgrowth, she quickly recognized the person as a fixture of the greenhouse itself.

"Of course she's here," Yumi whispered to herself, not at all bothered—in fact, a bit more excited than she was willing to admit to herself.

The other young woman looked up, recognizing her immediately. "Yumi-chan!" she said, though her usual enthusiasm was diminished somewhat. She seemed to have been broken out of deep thought.

"Sei-sama, what are you doing here?" Yumi said pleasantly. She came around the little path to get closer, quickly throwing a glance over her shoulder at the roses, before turning her attention back to Sei. "It's been awhile."

They ran into each other at school on occasion, but lately she had the feeling that Sei had been keeping her distance. Whether she was intentionally trying to give Yumi space, allowing her to independently adjust to her first year at Lillian University, or whether Sei was just absorbed in her studies, Yumi wasn't sure.

"Come here and sit a spell!" Sei whacked the space next to her on the bench she was slouching on.

Yumi sat down obligingly, smoothing her skirt with her hands once she was comfortable.

They looked at each other for a moment. It was the intense and slightly awkward eye contact that they always had, this brief exchange of energy between them. It was an acknowledgement, Yumi thought, of those unexplored parts of their connection, what had always simmered slightly below the surface—and a seemingly mutual agreement that they would never explore it.

"You look a bit gloomy," Sei finally declared.

"And you don't?" Yumi said bluntly, studying Sei's face. Yumi knew that Sei also had a bittersweet relationship with the greenhouse. It wasn't all that surprising that she had apparently come here to brood as well, as much as she often claimed to hate the place.

"It's the weather. Makes me moody."

"You're never moody."

Sei chuckled softly. "All right, all right. But what's on your mind? Tell me why you're here first."

Yumi pressed her hands together in her lap and sighed. "You know why."

"Sachiko stuff, huh?" Sei guessed—correctly.

Yumi nodded. "She's been...stressed lately. She's been having arguments with Kashiwagi-san about the future, and I know she doesn't like to burden me with her problems, but—"

"Sachiko's attitude is contagious for you. It's like you're joined by some invisible force."

Yumi nodded again.

"Well, it can't be helped," Sei said. "That's how it's always been with you two. It's enviable in a way. I wish I could stand to be so close to someone myself."

"So why are _you_ here, then?" Yumi asked.

It was Sei's turn to sigh, but there was an odd smile on her face as she turned her eyes away and stared off into the distance. "To be honest, I don't know. I'm questioning myself, Yumi, for the first time in years."

"Questioning yourself?" Yumi cocked her head to the side. "But you've always been so self-confident."

"Nah, it's not about my confidence," Sei said, her smile growing brighter. "I'd never lose that. It's just...something weird happened a few nights ago. Something really confusing."

"Did you finally confess to Katou-san?" Yumi teased.

"Why, you think she's interested?" Sei said jokingly. Then her smile faded somewhat. "No, no. Though my hooking up with Katou Kei would definitely be weird, what happened to me was a lot weirder. The whole thing started Monday night, when I went to this bar that's for—you know—people like us." Sei didn't wink at Yumi, but the expression on her face seemed like it was well-suited for a wink.

"People like us? What do you mean?" Yumi decided to play dumb, even as she knew her face was probably betraying her. She had never actually told Sei about her preferences explicitly. Sure, a lot of girls at Lillian had romantic friendships with other girls, but the issue of growing up and maturing into adult relationships of a similar nature had never been a subject of conversation between them. Most girls weren't "like that," after all.

Yumi knew that it didn't make much sense, but it felt unfair that Sei just seemed to know.

"Oh, come on, Yumi-chan," Sei said, grinning from ear to ear. "We're not in high school anymore. You know I like girls—more than just in a friendly way. You have to know that, right? I was at a gay bar."

Yumi shifted uncomfortably in her seat. "Okay, yes, I know," she said quietly. "But what about that other part? What's up with the 'us' part?"

"Oh, you also like girls," Sei responded immediately, as if it were the most self-evident thing in the world. Much to Yumi's outrage, Sei was practically rolling her eyes.

Her annoyance was tinged with a sudden wave of self-consciousness, though. "Is it...is it that obvious?" Yumi asked.

Sei's expression softened. "What? No, no. It's just obvious to me because, well, I'm the same way." Sei shrugged. "I've always figured you liked girls in 'that way,' almost since I first met you. It's not news to me or anything. Even if it were obvious to other people, though, there's nothing wrong with that."

"I know, I just...," Yumi trailed off.

"You're not ready to let other people know," Sei said. "I get that. I wish I had that luxury. I'm much too obvious."

Yumi cleared her throat suddenly, folding her hands in her lap. "Anyway," she said. "This isn't about me. We were talking about what happened to you the other night, remember?"

"Oh, right, right!" Sei scratched the back of her head, her gaze wandering as if she were trying to piece together a memory. "So I was at this bar in the gay district. It was one that's a little bigger than the usual, you know, one with actual tables here and there. I sat down at the bar and ordered a beer from the _onabe_ who was bartending and..."

* * *

Sei crouched over the bar and chugged her beer. She had always felt awkward at these kinds of places, but having only become legal the year before, occasionally she felt compelled to assert her right to pound back a few drinks. More importantly, there was something about bars like these, something that made her feel less alone, even if she rarely talked to anyone.

She looked around the room, at the shelf behind the bar stacked with fancy alcohol that she didn't recognize, at the low tables next to a few couches in the lounge area, at the TV screens that were playing some kind of music video mix in an endless loop. The place was mostly empty, probably because it was early evening on a Monday night and other people had better things to do.

As she scanned the rest of the landscape, her eyes abruptly stopped at the far corner of the room. It was the darkest area, with only a couple of tables and chairs. One of the few other patrons was sitting alone in front of what looked like a solitary beer.

It was a girl. She was so small and unassuming, that Sei had almost missed her. She realized immediately why her brain had taken notice, though: even in the dim light, she could see that the girl looked a bit like Yumi. In fact, for a split second, she had thought that she was.

The girl indeed was about the same size and frame as Yumi, but had a slightly younger-looking face. Her brown hair was also cut shorter, styled in a rather feminine way, with a small rose-shaped barrette tucked into her locks. She was wearing a one-piece dress, her legs crossed tightly against the cold of the room in an amusingly obvious way.

She looked oddly familiar to Sei, and Sei could swear she had seen her face somewhere before. Perhaps at Lillian? She felt like she would have remembered a girl like that, though.

Sei shrugged to herself. Maybe the familiarity was only because she reminded her of Yumi.

"You gonna talk to her or what?" the bartender asked, breaking Sei out of her thoughts.

She turned and looked over at him, and he met her with a teasing look.

"I don't know, man, I'm kind of antisocial, if you haven't noticed."

"You've been here a couple of times already and I haven't seen you with a single girl," he said. "Go talk to her. She looks lonely."

"You're just telling me that so that I'll end up staying here longer and buying more drinks."

"Exactly."

Sei heaved a deep and nervous sigh as she looked over her shoulder at the girl. She had never approached anyone at a bar before, but perhaps the bartender was right. When was she going to meet any girls who were actually interested in other girls? At Lillian University? Was she just going to pick up somebody in the middle of class?

Sei hesitated for a moment, then started sliding lazily off the bar stool, beer in hand.

When she reached the far side of the room, which for some reason had much worse lighting, it took a moment for her eyes to adjust. The girl didn't seem to notice her standing there awkwardly, and seemed instead to be entranced by the surface of the table, staring at it like it was the most interesting thing in the world.

Without so much as mumbling a greeting, Sei grabbed the opposite chair and sat down with an abrupt thump. The girl finally looked up at Sei, and she looked immediately alarmed.

"You're too young to be drinking here," Sei said. "There's no way you're twenty."

The girl's eyes widened. "Are you...going to tell the bartender?" she whispered, panic written all over her expression.

Sei couldn't help but burst into laughter. "Jesus, at least try to deny it!"

She seemed bashful then, tucking her hands into her lap and looking at the floor. "Um, I'm twenty?" she said.

"Are you asking me?" Sei chuckled, but she toned it down a bit as she noticed the girl clamming up. "Sorry, sorry. Jeez, you don't have to take it so seriously. I'm just messing with you. I don't care if you're underage. It doesn't look like you came here to drink, anyway."

"What makes you say that?"

Sei pointed at the bottle in front of her. "Your beer's nearly untouched."

"Oh," she looked down at her drink, almost as if she were seeing it for the first time.

"How old are you, anyway?" Sei ventured to ask. She studied the other woman's face more carefully this time. It was true that she looked young, but her features were painted over with that messy kind of makeup job that inexperienced girls use to try to look older. Ironically, it made her seem like a schoolgirl, totally out of place. "Are you still in high school?"

"No, no!" she answered immediately. "I'm in my first year of university. I'm eighteen."

"Ah, okay," Sei mumbled, taking a swig of her beer. "That's not so bad, then. Did you go to Lillian Academy? You look familiar." She figured she may as well ask.

The girl's eyes widened again in surprise, and she stared at Sei's face more intensely for a moment. Some kind of sense of recognition seemed to dawn on her. "You're...the former Rosa Gigantea. From a few years back?"

"Ah-ha, so you did go to Lillian! That's where I know you from."

"...yes," she said in a low voice full of hesitation. Then she quickly added: "I mean, no—I mean, we went to the school at different times."

"Oh, so you must have transferred in after I left, then."

The girl nodded and looked away slightly.

"Then how do you know who I am? Were you friends with some of the other Rosas?"

She nodded again. "I saw you briefly at the school festival, from a distance."

"Oh come now, I would have noticed you, I think! You're much too cute to miss," Sei said, leaning in a little, getting a better look at her.

The girl blushed immediately. "Uh, well, we've never talked or anything."

"Do you know Fukuzawa Yumi?" Sei decided to ask. It seemed like the next logical question, so she was a little surprised to find that her table partner had taken on a more nervous demeanor immediately.

"Yes...yes, a little. I know her a little. Very casually. We're not, like, super close friends or anything," she said hastily.

"So were you two in the same class or something?"

"No!" the girl practically shouted, then, seemingly shocked at her own outburst, she added in a lower voice: "No, we were never in the same class. You know what? We didn't really know each other that well at all. We were just acquaintances, actually. I was the kind of person who just faded into the background, so she probably wouldn't even remember me. I don't think anyone would remember me, really, even if you asked them." She laughed a little, though it sounded totally forced.

Sei threw her a weird look. "Okay," she said, her eyebrows knotting. But she decided not to press the issue too much.

The girl sighed. "I'm sorry," she said after a moment. "I just...didn't expect anyone to recognize me here, you know?" She looked away listlessly. "I really, really didn't want to be recognized."

Sei gazed at her for a long moment, then nodded slowly in understanding. "Don't apologize," she said. "I get it. I totally do. If none of your friends know that you like girls, I can see why you might be paranoid."

The ghost of an odd, sardonic smile began to appear on the younger woman's face. Sei couldn't quite interpret what it meant. "Yeah, nobody thinks I like girls. No one. Even if I told them that I did, I doubt they would believe me. They would think I was making it all up."

Sei looked at her with compassion. "Oh yeah, people are full of denial about that kind of thing, no doubt about that."

"I guess the problem is that I'm so...feminine. If I told anyone I liked girls, they'd just take it as a joke. I really do like girls, though."

"Yeah, I can definitely see that," Sei agreed. "People think that if you're not a raging butch, then you're just confused."

The girl nodded quickly, but somehow seemed to be getting increasingly fidgety and nervous. Sei guessed that this had to do with the thread of the conversation.

She took a deep breath and picked up her own drink. "I feel like I've made you uncomfortable. I can leave if you want."

"No!" the girl protested. "No, no, that's okay. I'm just nervous, that's all. It's my first time going out to a bar all dressed up."

"Oh," Sei said, scratching her chin. "Yeah, I guess you're still new to this. Well, you have nothing to worry about here. We're all basically in the same boat. Your secrets are safe with me." Sei winked at her.

"Thanks," she said. "I guess I'm just not used to being around other...outsiders. I'm used to being the only weird one."

Sei laughed. "Tell me about it. You would think in a place like Lillian, there would be tons of other people like us, right? I only knew a few."

This seemed to pique the young woman's interest, and she leaned over the table, moving slightly closer to Sei for the first time. "Really?" she asked, her face full of scandalized excitement. "Who? Who?"

"Jeez, you should have worked for the school newspaper," Sei teased. "Anyway, I can't tell you. You might know some of them, and most of these girls really don't want to be found out."

"Oh my goodness, are any of the members of the Yamayurikai...like that?"

Sei raised an eyebrow. "As far as being actually gay? Like, grown up and still liking girls? Besides me, there's only one, but there's no way I'm telling you who that is." She paused. "Hmm, there might also be another one who is bi or something like that. We kind of had a thing, sort of. A thing that never happened."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, she liked me, I'm pretty sure. No, I'm more than pretty sure—she basically told me to my face. She was as obvious as she could be without outright confessing. To this day, I'm actually shocked that she had the courage to be so obvious when she absolutely knew I would reject her. And I did." Sei looked away for a moment, her gaze falling at a random spot on the white wall across from her.

"Why did you reject her?" the other girl whispered. "If she was a member of the Yamayurikai, then she must have been beautiful, and respectable, and graceful, and talented and—"

"Whoa, whoa there. Don't forget that I was a member of that same student council and I was none of those things," Sei laughed. "You must have really idolized them."

The girl pulled back a little and shrugged. "I guess. I used to wish that I could be a Rosa, that I could be Sachiko-sama's little sister."

"A lot of girls did," Sei murmured. "It wasn't what most people thought, though. It was a lot of work to be in the Yamayurikai, and not nearly as glamorous as it looked."

"It was just a fantasy," she agreed, her voice wistful. "In reality, it would have been impossible."

"I wouldn't go _that_ far, though I'll admit it was kind of exclusive and overly hard to get in." Sei paused for a moment, then said suddenly, unprompted: "If you really want to know, I rejected her because she loved me. She loved me for exactly who I was, and I wasn't really into that at the time. At that point in my life, love had to be this difficult thing to attain. It had to be dramatic. There had to be yelling and tears, or else it wasn't love."

"That's awful," said the young woman.

"Yeah, well, that's being seventeen," Sei told her. "Besides, she wasn't really my type. She was beautiful, of course, but she was one of those elegant, majestic types. Not really my thing."

"What _is_ your type, then?" The girl leaned in a little again, propping her elbow on the table, resting her chin on her hand.

Sei smiled as their eyes met with what seemed like flirtatious intent for the first time. Then again, maybe she was imagining things.

 _Then again_ , maybe they had been flirting the whole time. Maybe that's what all of this was.

"My type?" Sei echoed, her gaze tilting upwards as she gave it some thought. Come to think of it, she had never really pondered too deeply about the subject before. When she saw what she liked, she simply knew it right away, _wanted_ it right away. "I guess I like more innocent girls," she began slowly. "Girls who are a little clueless, a little less self-aware than most, a little awkward and unrefined." She stopped, then met the other woman's gaze directly. "Girls like you."

For her part, the young woman before her stared back in awe, completely taken by surprise at Sei's audacity.

Sei held her gaze with a steady intensity, then made a split-second decision. "You're interesting," she said. "You want to get out of here? Let's go somewhere where we can get to know each other better."

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean," Sei said, her voice unwavering, if amused. Deep inside, though, she was starting to panic a little. It was true that they had only just met. She hadn't even so much as touched her yet, and now she was trying to get her to leave, to go...somewhere. Where were they going, anyway? She hadn't thought that far ahead. Sei could feel her blood starting to pound in her ears.

"Um...okay!" the girl said after a moment, a tiny smile of anticipation growing on her face.

 _All right, so she does like me,_ Sei thought, a bit relieved, though she still wasn't sure what she was going to do. As impulsive as she was, she was probably almost as inexperienced as the little brunette in front of her.

In an instant, she nearly jumped out of her chair, reaching out and grabbing the girl's hand before she could think better of it. "Let's go," she said. She pulled her to her feet and led her quickly through the bar, which was starting to fill with a trickle of customers. Behind her, Sei could hear the sharp thumping of a pair of heels trying to keep up with her long strides.

When they made it outside, it was cooler than Sei expected, a nippy gust of wind making the hairs of her body immediately stand on end. She stared at the girl, who was bathed in a mixture of moonlight and the shine from a nearby street lamp.

She could see her features a lot more clearly now. Her face was absolutely adorable, with the energetic quality of a girl much younger. Now that they were standing up, Sei could see that the girl was a bit taller than she had originally assumed—though still quite shorter than Sei herself. _As I prefer,_ she thought.

She felt the stir of physical desire growing within her, but something in her mind was wary of it. _She looks a lot like Yumi, even out here in better lighting. Maybe that's why I'm attracted to her. Is that really fair to her, though? To act out some kind of sexual tension I have with someone else?_

The girl seemed to brace herself a little against the wind, but she didn't cross her arms. Sei followed the line of her gangly arms and bony shoulders as they led into the top of her sleeveless dress. The edge of her collar bone peaked out of the top of her dress, and framed the bottom of a delicate neck with a slightly prominent throat. Sei suddenly had the strange impulse that she wanted to put her mouth against it.

The young woman brought her hand to her neck and covered it up, seemingly unconsciously, as she bashfully noticed the direction of Sei's gaze.

"What...what is it?" she asked. "Is something wrong?"

Sei shook her head. No, it wasn't just that she looked like Yumi. In her own way, she was interesting. Mature and built with much too sturdy of a body for her frame, yet at the same time innocent, dainty.

She indeed wanted to get to know her. In a naked way. There was nothing stopping her, either. These feelings of freedom were so alien to her that she wasn't sure what to do; no immediate action came to mind.

The girl seemed to grow increasingly self-conscious as the silence widened. Sei snapped out of it after a moment, and realizing the awkwardness that she had caused, grabbed the girl's hand once again and pulled her in the direction of a side street.

"Where are we going?" she asked, but her voice was full of excitement, naked anticipation, almost like she hoped Sei wouldn't tell her at all.

They ducked into a small alleyway near the bar. There was no one there to see them. Sei's heart was pounding so quickly, she briefly wondered if she was having palpitations. It was only then that she realized she had been holding her breath.

The girl was smiling, a smile that she was trying to hold back in vain by biting her lip. Her expressions were so transparently obvious, like Yumi's. She was so clearly full of nervous excitement that it radiated from her every pore and only fueled Sei's arousal.

Sei pushed her gently against the wall of the building beside them.

 _What am I doing?_ Sei thought to herself.

She nearly tripped as she slid forward, her body pressing harder than she had intended against the other girl. In an instant, they were chest-to-chest, their eyes locked in one of the most intense stares of her life.

 _What am I_ —

She crushed her mouth against the lips of the young woman in front of her. After a moment of shock, the girl responded, relaxing into her, kissing her in return, their chests pushing into each other with every one of their rapid breaths. Sei could feel their hearts pounding together. She could taste some type of flavored lipstick that was being quickly and messily smeared from the girl's lips.

As she deeply inhaled to catch her breath, she took in this girl's unique scent, something she found nostalgic somehow...and yet new. She didn't smell like any other girl Sei had ever kissed. It was a delicate smell, but slightly stronger than she was used to. She liked it.

They leaned further into each other, opened their mouths to each other. Without even thinking, Sei finally pressed the bottom half of her body hard against the other girl, wanting to feel her arousal and...

Sei paused. She thought she had felt something strange, but she adjusted and closed her eyes again, brushed her lips against the other girl's lips, then let her mouth wander down to her neck. She pressed herself fully against the girl again, pushing their hips together more deliberately this time.

Then she immediately pulled back in utter shock.

"Oh God," the younger woman said, before Sei had even managed to look at her in surprise.

Sei was speechless, the look on the girl's face answering all of the questions that she might have asked.

Still, she tried: "What...was that?" Sei gasped stupidly, her warm breath hitting the cool air outside like a gust of steam. She was standing back just far enough that she was no longer touching the girl. She wasn't sure why she was asking. She knew exactly what it had been; maybe she was still hoping that she was mistaken.

The girl looked frozen in place, though her eyes were darting around as if she were trying to figure out where she could run. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm sorry, it just happened. You were kissing me, and I liked it, and I can't control it, I..."

So it was true. Sei swallowed hard. A few emotions ran through her mind. Underneath her surprise, she noticed an odd flare of anger, though it dissipated quickly. Mostly, she was just supremely confused.

When she could finally form words, Sei stared at the girl with as neutral an expression as she could manage. "Why...?" she began. She stopped. She took a shallow breath, then started again: "Why didn't you tell me that you were a boy?"

"I...I'm not!" she protested.

The anger returned. "What the hell was that I felt under your skirt, then? It sure as hell wasn't your phone or something. I felt the damn thing twitch!"

The girl turned beet red. After a moment, she looked directly at Sei. "Yeah, I have the parts, all right?" she said softly. "But I'm not a boy. I just have the parts, that's all." Her voice broke a little on the last syllable, visible droplets starting to form in her eyes.

Sei's anger softened. She put her hand to her own forehead and let out a long breath. She wanted suddenly to comfort the girl, in spite of herself, but she held back, still extremely disturbed by the whole ordeal.

"Why didn't you just tell me?" Sei asked again, though she wondered if there was even a point.

"I didn't expect all of this," she stammered. "It all happened so fast and I was caught up in the moment, and...you never asked! Besides, if I had told you, you would have thought I was a boy. _And I'm not a boy._ " The last part came out harshly, as if she were saying it not towards Sei, specifically—but more towards the rest of the world.

Sei began rubbing her face with both hands, groaning loudly. "You're right," she said. "This is my fault. This is all my fault. I shouldn't have dragged you out here and tried to practically undress you in this alleyway of all places. I was too forward, I moved way too fast. I'm sorry." She started to turn around.

"No!" the girl, who was apparently not a boy, said quickly. "Don't apologize. I liked it. I like _you_."

"Yeah, but you do know that I don't swing that way, right?" Sei gave her a severe look. "I don't like boys at all."

"I told you, I'm not a—"

"Yeah, yeah, okay," Sei said, waving her hands back and forth. "I get it. I'm sorry. I guess we can just say you're not the type of girl I usually go for."

The young woman looked deflated. "I figured." Her whole body shuddered from the cold in that moment, her skinny frame flexing uncomfortably against the wall. Suddenly, Sei's eyes were drawn to her shape once again, to the lines of her form, up to the angles of her face and the messy tinge of pale red that still clung to her lips.

What was the type of girl Sei usually went for, if it wasn't this kind? Somehow, the physical attraction hadn't faded. Part of Sei's body was still quite perturbed that their activities had been cut short. She sighed deeply. _Kissing her and whatnot was perfectly fine, but what about under her clothes? That's a problem, isn't it?_

Sei couldn't help but glance down at the other girl's chest quickly, realizing only now that she hadn't felt anything there earlier, in the heat of the moment. She knew a lot of flat-chested girls, though, so it hadn't really seemed out of the ordinary at the time.

Sei staggered over to the wall. Her legs felt heavy all of a sudden. She leaned back beside the girl, keeping a comfortable distance, turning to look at her.

"So you didn't go to Lillian, then, did you?" she asked. "Unless you're extremely good at forging documents."

The young woman shook her head, wearing a sheepish look.

"So you don't know Yumi, either, do you?"

The girl was silent for a moment, as if she were debating what to say. Finally, she took a sharp breath and nodded. "Actually, I do. I'm friends with her brother, and we were in the same year. I was in the student council of Hanadera Academy with him."

Sei resisted the urge to say, _"Ugh, does that mean you know Kashiwagi, too?"_ That's when it dawned on her. "Ohhh," Sei said. "That's why you were acting so weird about the whole Yumi thing earlier. You didn't want me to figure you out, is that it?"

"No," she said. "I didn't want you to see me in the bar and then mention it to people I know. I mean, they know that I'm a girl, that I...dress like this. They even call me by a girl's name. I just didn't want them to know I went to a gay bar. It's kind of embarrassing. And if it got back to my parents, it would be even worse. I promised them that I would stop wearing dresses after I graduated high school." She paused. "Besides..."

"Besides?"

She smiled at Sei. "Besides, it was nicer when you didn't know. You treated me like a normal girl—wanted me like a normal girl—and that hardly ever happens to me. You're right, I didn't want you to figure me out."

Sei couldn't help but smile a little, leaning lazily against the wall. Then, something abruptly came to mind, something she realized that she should have addressed earlier.

"Uh, what's your name anyway?" Sei asked. "A moment ago we were sharing our germs with each other, so at the very least we should properly introduce ourselves, I guess. I'm Satou Sei, by the way."

She looked up at Sei pleasantly. "My name is Alice. How do you do?"

* * *

Yumi gaped at Sei in complete shock. True to form, her emotions were all over her face, and she could tell that Sei was reading each and every one of them. She couldn't help it, though. Out of all of the people she could have imagined randomly meeting—and canoodling—at a bar in downtown Tokyo, these two would have been her last guess.

She just couldn't wrap her mind around it. Satou Sei-sama...kissing Alice-kun? _Alice-kun?_ Full-on, swapping spit, groping each other in an alley? It was just so beyond the realm of her imagination, and yet somehow her mind kept playing images of the scene over and over again. She tried to think of something else—it was rude to imagine such things, after all—and yet she couldn't stop herself. In a weird way, she was totally fascinated.

Sei merely looked at her in amusement.

"So, uh," Yumi began, trying to clear her thoughts, to be respectful. "What happened afterwards?" New images came to her mind though, and try as she might, she couldn't fight the question that she was asking Sei with her expression, even if she didn't dare verbalize it.

"You want to know if I took her to a love hotel or something?" Sei asked, laughing.

Yumi knew it was pointless to deny it, so she merely nodded.

"No, no," Sei said dismissively. "After that, we talked for a few more minutes and then I went home. It was all too much to deal with at the time. It had been such a weird night, in a lot of different ways."

Yumi tapped her own chin thoughtfully. "That's a shame," she said.

"What, that we didn't hook up?" Sei looked amused.

"No, that you betrayed her confidence."

"What?"

"You said that her secret was safe with you, and here you are telling me the whole story."

It was Sei's turn to appear thoughtful. "Hm, I guess you're right. I didn't think about that. Why do I always tell you my secrets so easily, anyway? Now I feel like an idiot," she said, but she was smiling. "I suppose it's a good thing that I didn't actually tell you the _whole_ story, then. At least there's that."

When Sei got up awhile later without saying anything, Yumi's gaze followed the older woman as she wandered out the greenhouse door. "I'll see you later, Yumi," Sei said as she was already stepping out. "I have some stuff to think about. Thanks for letting me spill my guts, as always." She threw her a smirk over her shoulder.

Yumi couldn't resist smiling back. Still, something inside of her was burning with frustrated curiosity. _What_ was _the whole story?_ She wondered if she would ever find out.


	2. Chapter 2: In Her Favor

**Chapter 2: In Her Favor**

" _And...coming out...of his mouse...was a sharp...double-edged sword. His face was like—_ "

"It's ' _mouth,'_ " Sei corrected gently in English. She was leaning back in her chair, her hands folded behind her head, her legs crossed at her ankles. For awhile now, she had been staring out the window, watching the street lights turn on like fireflies across the landscape.

The young woman sitting at the low table nearby scratched her head. "Yeah, that's what I said: _'mouse.'_ "

" _Mouthhh,_ " Sei repeated, emphasizing the last two consonants. She finally looked over at her study partner. "You gotta say the last part like you have a lisp, Katou."

Truth be told, Sei couldn't help but feel a bit like a fraud since she had only just learned how to make that sound herself a couple of years before. The more time she spent studying her major, the more she got used to this feeling, though.

"Ah hell," Kei said, letting her book drop onto the table. "What difference does it make, anyway? You don't need to know how to pronounce English to pass a written test."

Sei wagged her finger in playful rebuke. "Tsk, tsk, Katou. English is the _lingua franca_ right now. If you run into a foreigner, he's not going to give you a sheet of paper with multiple-choice questions. He's just going to stare at you in confusion. Do you want to pass a class or speak the language of the world?"

"Both, ideally—but I'll take what I can get." Kei pursed her lips, flipping through the pages in front of her. "And I'd tell you to go to hell for lecturing me like that, but right now you seem to be my only hope."

"Glad that you finally admit it," Sei said, only to be met with a glare. "That's me: Satou Sei, everyone's last resort. You're not the only one, either. Remember that girl from your statistics class? She's taking English this semester, too, and she won't stop calling me. I've tutored her like three times this week."

"And you have yet to properly thank me for the referral, not to mention the other half-dozen people I've sent your way."

Sei shot her a suggestive glance. "Oh? And how should I 'properly' thank you? Is there a _special favor_ you had in mind?"

As Sei expected, Kei merely rolled her eyes sarcastically and let out a huff. "You can start by giving me a cut of the money they've been paying you," she said.

Sei shrugged. "It's not much. Beer money, just about." She had to silently admit, though, that Kei had accidentally helped her start a fledgling business. Even people whom neither of them knew had been approaching her lately, just through word of mouth.

"Don't let it get to your head too much, Satou-san," Kei said, as if she had heard her thoughts. "They're probably seeking you out because of your looks more than anything else. You know how people are."

" _Really?_ I mean, I know I'm painfully good-looking and all the girls are fawning over me day and night, but I'm sure at least some of my customers are in it for the actual English lessons." Sei paused. "Wait, does this make you kind of like a pimp, then?"

Kei threw her yet another disapproving glance. "That's not what I mean. Obviously, you look foreign. Anybody who doesn't know you would think you're at least a _haafu_ , if not fully European. They're going to assume you speak English well."

"Hm, you think so?" Sei scratched her chin thoughtfully. "Guess it works in my favor, then—especially since I don't." The last part was supposed to be a joke, but her tone came out a touch too serious. She sighed and moved her attention back to the window, peering out into the now dimly-lit street, which she could just see beyond the thick foliage of the yard.

After a long moment passed, she suddenly realized with genuine surprise that Kei had been staring at her. Sei cracked a smile, ready to smooth out the sudden tension with another rude remark, but something in Kei's expression made her stop.

"Satou-san," Kei began. "I've been meaning to ask you something lately."

"Yes?" Sei said, confused.

"Don't take this the wrong way, but...is there something going on with you?"

"Huh?" Now Sei was intrigued. She hadn't known Kei to be quite this perceptive, especially since Sei couldn't remember doing anything out of the ordinary—nothing that would tip most people off, anyway. "There _is_ something," she admitted, still smiling. "But how would you know that?"

"I don't know. You've just been...quiet lately, a little weirder than usual."

 _"Than usual?"_ Sei decided to ignore the last part. She stretched her arms over her head lazily, then slumped back into her chair. "Mm, I guess it's all the studying I've been doing lately, along with all the tutoring. My brain's in a fog."

" _Satou,_ " Kei said. In just those two syllables, Sei could somehow hear the echo of a much more unsavory phrase: _"Quit your bullshit."_

"All right, all right," Sei said, throwing her hands up. "You got me. It's because of a girl."

Kei raised an eyebrow, looking mildly surprised. "Seriously? I've never seen you this hung up about a girl before. You've been staring out of windows and brooding like a high schooler all week. What is she doing to you, playing hard-to-get?"

"Eh, not exactly." _I'm the one who's hard to get, for once,_ Sei thought. "I guess you could say it's more the circumstances that I met her in. It made me think about stuff—about the past."

"The past?"

Sei started to slide off her chair and onto one of the floor cushions. Instead of sitting up, though, she let her whole body go slack until she was lying with her back against the tatami mat. She could feel Kei's gaze trained on her.

"You ever go through a bad experience, grow from it, and think to yourself, 'oh, I'm glad I'll never have to go through something like that again'? Not because that kind of stuff doesn't happen anymore, but because you're a different person and you think you can handle it easily if it happens again?" Sei said.

Kei stared at her. "...Yes. I suppose so. I think I know what you mean. Things are usually easier the second time around."

"Right. Usually they are. This time, though, I'm not so sure. Or...maybe I just didn't grow to be as strong as I thought."

"You're being really vague."

Sei sighed, nodding in agreement, but not making any effort to elaborate. She felt that familiar heavy feeling from the other night, except that it had traveled from her legs up to the rest of her body. It was some kind of resistance—to what, she wasn't sure.

"When I was in high school," she began after a moment, "I fell in love with this girl who was in the grade below me. Like, feverishly in love. I was so in love, it was like a sickness. At first, I didn't know what was going on. All I knew was that the moment I saw her, I was completely drawn to her with every ounce of my being." She turned over onto her side and looked over at Kei. "Eventually, we had to be separated. We tried to run away together and everything."

Kei smiled at her sadly, sympathetically. "Young love can be completely irrational, that's for sure."

"It _is_ irrational," Sei said. "I _was_ irrational, entirely so—and selfish. For a long time, I wallowed in my pain, but eventually I realized that I had hurt her just as much. And I guess you can say that I haven't really trusted myself with romance since then. It's why I don't really date much. It's why I tend to hold back whenever I feel anything close to those initial feelings of attraction. I don't want to get sucked back into that vortex out of my own stupidity, only to have to tear myself away from it again."

"So, you're afraid of love's impermanence?" Kei asked. Her eyes seemed to search the room for the photo of her mother and father that she always kept on the desk. "No love is going to last forever. That doesn't mean it isn't worth it."

Sei shook her head. "I understand that. The friendship I had with that girl wasn't painful so much because it was cut short—it was more like the pain was a feature of the relationship itself. Having those kinds of passionate feelings for someone, you're bound to go crazy in some way. I just can't see myself thrusting all of my feelings onto someone like that again; it's a little too dangerous. Sometimes it's just better to compartmentalize things."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, ever since then, I've kept most of my close relationships platonic, more or less. And the few girls that I've slept with, I haven't been very close with. Some of them I've never met more than once or twice."

"That doesn't sound very romantic."

"Yes, exactly," Sei said. "My relationship with Yumi is probably more romantic than the one I had with the last girl I went out with."

"Somehow, I can't imagine you out on a formal date with anyone." Kei seemed to pause then, bringing her hand to her chin pensively. "To be honest, for awhile I thought that you and Fukuzawa—"

"No." Sei chuckled a little. "Don't get me wrong, we do like each other. There's something there, for sure—but no, that's never going to happen. We've known each other for too long, I think, and we met under the wrong circumstances. Besides, that kid is still completely obsessed with an upperclassman that she was _soeurs_ with in high school."

"All right," Kei said, waving a dismissive hand, "but this still doesn't explain why you've been sulking like this lately. What happened with this new girl you met?"

Sei very deliberately looked up at the ceiling and let out a long breath. "For the first time in a long time, I had...that feeling again."

"What feeling?"

"I looked at this girl, and the more I talked to her, the more I felt magnetically drawn to her. I was insanely curious about her, almost instantly attracted. It wasn't just a physical attraction, either, though that was definitely there. Something like that hadn't happened to me for years, since high school. I thought it would never happen again, after…."

"So what did you do?" Kei asked, and then, apparently thinking better of it, added, "Spare me the graphic details, though."

Sei laughed. "There's not much to tell. Of course I hesitated at first, but eventually I couldn't stop myself. I made a move on her, and then...it was like the universe had played a cruel joke on me."

"She was straight?"

"No," Sei said. "I can deal with that. _This,_ though, I don't think I can deal with."

Kei was quiet for a long moment, waiting for Sei to explain. When she didn't, Kei started to get up. She grabbed a tray of empty tea cups from the table and looked down at her friend. "Hopefully, you'll find a way, Satou-san," she said. "For someone with such a positive attitude, you sure have a way of resisting love."

"You're just saying that because it never worked out between you and me." Sei winked at her, and for a second Kei looked like she was about to throw the tray at her grinning face.

* * *

By the time Sei was wandering the streets on her way home, it was well after dark. The M bus would still be running for a few more hours, but she knew that she'd have to pass by the school to get to the stop, and she wasn't in the mood to run into anyone she knew.

So she sped up her pace as she passed the outside of Lillian's gates, a little relieved that there was only a slow trickle of students leaving the school at this hour. Mostly, they looked like the studious types, heading out from the library after cramming for their exams.

Just as she was nearly in the clear, she heard a pair of footfalls coming in closely behind her. Even though they didn't sound particularly fast or desperate, she somehow knew that whoever it was intended to make a bee-line for her.

"Satou-san!" a sort-of-familiar voice called after her.

Sei debated pretending that she hadn't heard, but since the girl had gone so far as to call out to her across the block, she figured that it was only right to be generous. Sei spun around, nodding politely as her kohai half-bowed to her.

"Ah, eh…," Sei said, trying hard to rack her brain for the girl's name. Finally, it came: "Kawakami-san. What's up?"

"How rude!" Kawakami said. "I've been looking for you all day, and all you have to say to me is 'What's up'? Anyway, I told you to call me by my first name, didn't I?"

Sei couldn't remember her first name, either.

She looked at Sei with eyes that reminded her a bit of a deer—or something like that—all eyelashes and dilated pupils. For the first time, it struck Sei that the girl was being coquettish, possibly. It was true that she had been a bit touchy-feely during their tutoring sessions.

It was only then that she noticed the middle-aged man who was standing by the girl's side. He was slightly shorter than average, wore a salaryman-style suit, and had a good-natured smile on his face. Oddly enough, something about his features looked familiar, but Sei couldn't place where—or if—she had seen him before. _That's been happening a lot lately,_ she thought. Regardless, Sei nodded to him, too, inclining her head a bit deeper than she had towards her schoolmate.

"Did you forget that you're giving me an English lesson tonight, Satou-san?" Kawakami asked.

 _Is that what I'm giving you?_ Sei thought, and she fought the urge to say it out loud. "Yep, I forgot," she said instead. "What time was that again?"

Kawakami turned to the man next to her, who seemed amused by the exchange. "See how Satou-san abuses me? I told you." Then she added, with a twinkle in her eye, "She's the best, though. A real expert when it comes to language."

"Uh, thanks." Sei looked over her shoulder quickly and caught sight of the M bus just as it was leaving the stop. She silently cursed to herself.

"Since the library's closed now, why don't we just go to my place to study tonight?" Kawakami said, a tiny smile spreading across her lips. "I have a private apartment off campus." Then she suddenly seemed to remember something. "Oh my!" she exclaimed, turning to the man who had been patiently standing nearby the whole time. "Where are my manners? This is my uncle, from my mother's side!"

Sei recreated her previous bow, but zoned out as the man told her his name and occupation. "Satou Sei, third year Lillian University student. How do you do?" she murmured, the usual formal greeting coming out of her rather robotically.

"It's such a happy coincidence that I should see you here. I ran into Uncle not too long ago and promised him that I'd introduce you tonight when we met up for our tutoring session, but I guess that won't be necessary now that you've seen each other."

"Introduce us?" Sei gave her a strange look. _What for?_ she thought.

Sensing her confusion, the man smiled again and stepped forward. "I'm sorry, Satou-san, my niece is very poor when it comes to introductions. I have a university-aged son, you see, and I was hoping you could tutor him as well. He's been doing just terribly in his English classes lately."

"He's supposed to take over the family import-export business some day, so you can see how this might be a problem," Kawakami explained.

Her uncle gave her a wry look. "Now, now," he said, "there's no need to burden Satou-san with our family troubles. All I want to do is offer her a job." He turned to Sei. "Are you free Monday and Wednesday nights?"

Sei stared back and forth between him and Kawakami. They both looked at her with expectation.

"Uh," Sei finally said, "unfortunately, I've had a lot of similar requests lately, and between my own schoolwork and—"

"I promise I'll make it worth your while, Satou-san," he said, his smile growing a bit more pleading. "If what my niece says about you is true, then I'm sure you'll be able to work a few miracles, and I'm willing to pay just about any price for that." He pulled his card-wallet out of his suit pocket and handed Sei his business card.

On reflex, Sei accepted it with two hands and pretended to look it over for the required number of seconds. She looked up at him and sighed, giving him a hesitant glance. "I will consider it," she said finally.

"Just call the number on the front and ask my secretary for my home address. If it's all right with you, I'd like you to start right away, the sooner the better. Next Monday would be perfect." He nodded to both Kawakami and Sei, already starting to back away. "I have to run now, but please give my offer a fair consideration, Satou-san."

With that, he had turned and disappeared among the small crowd of students that were now spilling out onto the sidewalk.

Kawakami grabbed Sei by the arm with both hands, momentarily startling her. She looked up into Sei's eyes. That bashful, flirtatious smile had come back to the girl's face. "Shall we go now?" she asked.

As they turned to walk towards the bus terminal, Sei couldn't help but look over her shoulder, in the direction that Kawakami's uncle had run off to. "What exactly did you tell him about me, anyway?"

Kawakami's smile deepened and her face filled with admiration. "Just the truth: that you're at the top of your class, that you're an English literature major, and that you've been speaking English all your life because your parents are from America."

" _What?_ " Sei said, surprised at the last part. "That's news to me."

So Kei had been right.

"Oh, don't be so modest, Satou-san!" her schoolmate said, pressing herself against Sei, murmuring something about the cool night air, as if to justify the close proximity. But it wasn't cold at all.

Sei shook her head in defeat and decided not to correct Kawakami. _Who am I to shatter her fantasies?_ she thought. _Besides, if it_ _works in my favor_ _…._

* * *

Yumi stepped onto the mostly-empty train and looked back and forth across the aisle. She gave a sigh of relief when she saw no familiar faces, and slumped into the first seat that she could find.

She wondered why it was so hard to keep from running into someone precisely when you were trying to avoid them the most. Before, she would only ever notice Alice-kun's face among the throngs on her way to school every once in a blue moon, but now it seemed like she was seeing her everywhere. She had luckily been able to dodge her gaze on all of those occasions so far.

It was nothing personal. It was just that, as much as Yumi liked to think that she had developed into the perfect picture of a well-composed lady after all her years at Lillian, she was still very bad at hiding her embarrassment. She simply could not face Alice after hearing such a scandalous story about her and Sei-sama.

And worse, what if by some stroke of very bad luck, Alice wanted to actually talk about it with her for some reason? Yumi doubted she had anyone else to discuss it with, and if she was anything like Yumi herself, she was probably burning with the desire to tell somebody—anybody. Yumi was determined that this "somebody" would not be her.

How long could this possibly go on, though? She couldn't help but ask herself what she would do if Alice happened to see her first and approached her. What if Yuuki invited her over? How could she avoid her then?

Very suddenly, she felt a body carelessly flopping into the seat right next to her, bursting her out of her thoughts. She let out an unladylike shriek.

A few of the other train passengers turned to look at her with mild interest, and she quickly covered her mouth, though it was much too late. Coming to her senses finally, she jerked her neck to the side to see who had sat down next to her.

"Jeez, Yumi-chan, four years we've known each other, and you still greet me with that same little scream." Satou Sei reached over and pinched her cheek. "Come home with me tonight, and I'll give you something good to scream about."

Yumi swatted her hand away, irritated. "You could have announced your presence like a normal person, you know."

"If I did that, then how would I have gotten this great reaction from you?"

Yumi pursed her lips, the adrenaline of the moment wearing off a bit. Sei was sitting close by her, their sides touching slightly, and Yumi couldn't help but relax a bit against her warmth.

"Where have you been tonight, Yumi?" Sei asked. "This is a little late for you to be going home from school, isn't it?"

"What, do you keep tabs on my schedule or something?" When Sei only smiled in response, Yumi rolled her eyes and answered: "I was out shopping with Yoshino-san."

"Ahhh, nice. Did you buy me anything?"

"The only thing I would ever buy you are wasabi-flavored chocolates," Yumi said, but there was no malice in her voice. She gave Sei a genuine smile of affection. "What are _you_ doing here this late, anyway? We get out of school at about the same time on Fridays, don't we?"

Sei grinned at Yumi, poking her in the side and making her wiggle a bit. "I was on a date," she said.

"A date? _Really?_ "

"Why do you seem so shocked?" Sei complained. "And, no, not really. I was actually tutoring someone, but I think she was trying to _turn it_ into a date."

"Oh? How do you figure?"

"She grabbed my leg."

" _Really?_ Are you sure she didn't just trip and fall and your leg was the only thing she could grab onto to catch herself?" This time it was Yumi's turn to tease her.

"Again, why do you seem so shocked by this?" Sei pouted a little. "She was touching my leg under the table, getting quite handsy while I was trying to explain how to conjugate English verbs."

"Maybe your lessons are just so boring that she couldn't figure out anything else to do."

"Sheesh, you're breaking my heart tonight, Yumi-chan," Sei said, pressing her hand to her own chest in a gesture of mock hurt. "Besides, even the most boring tutor wouldn't drive anybody to do what she did next."

"What?"

"Her hands started to travel more and more, and eventually she grabbed my crotch! Just went and grabbed a handful of my bits! Can you believe that?"

"Shhhh! Not so loud!" Yumi looked around the train, though the other passengers were quite scattered, and she doubted that they could have heard. Yumi turned back to Sei after a moment. "I don't believe you," she said.

"Fine, don't." Sei shrugged. "It's the truth, though. I'm pretty sure she's the kind of girl who's only dated men up to this point. I guess she decided to just try what's worked for her so far."

"So it doesn't work on you? I always thought you were like an old man."

Sei ignored the last part. "No, it didn't work on me this time—at least not with Kawakami Kyoko doing the crotch-grabbing, anyway. I ended up looking at my watch and excusing myself early."

"Kawakami? Isn't that the girl in Onee-sama's class? I thought her first name was Keiko."

"Is it?" Sei said, looking at Yumi with vague curiosity.

Yumi huffed. "God, I can't believe that this girl practically had her hands down your pants, and you can't remember what her name is," she said, momentarily forgetting that she was supposed to be disbelieving Sei's story. "Hopefully your flimsy excuses were enough to discourage her."

"Nope, I don't think so. That girl is incorrigible, and pretty bad at taking a hint, too. She even asked me when the next time we could meet was." Sei scratched her head, her gaze falling out the window and towards the quickly-shifting landscape outside. "It's just as well," she said after a moment. "Maybe it's a sign that I should take her uncle's offer after all. He _is_ supposed to be paying well."

"Hm?" Yumi pressed her hand lightly against Sei's leg, trying to regain her attention. "What uncle?"

Sei looked down at her. "Oh, she apparently told her uncle all about me and my genius, and he wants me to tutor his son."

"What's wrong with that?"

"Eh, I don't know. I've been busy lately, and if he's anything like the rest of his family, he'll be a little vapid and pushy." Then she added, a bit sheepishly, "Besides...all the students that I've tutored so far were from Lillian, so they were all girls."

"So?"

"So...I don't know. I've just never tutored a boy before. I'm not sure if it'll be any different. Do we have to study with the door open or something?" Sei grinned at Yumi's wry expression.

"You can't live in a garden of maidens forever, Sei-sama," she said.

"Right you are, Yumi-chan, right you are." Sei threw an arm around Yumi, pulling her closer.

As much as Yumi tried to stay casually alert, she couldn't help but close her eyes for a moment and inhale Satou Sei's pleasantly familiar scent.

* * *

When Monday evening rolled around, somehow Sei found herself standing at the gate of a conspicuously large house. The front yard was adorned with topiaries and small statues, and Sei was half-surprised that there wasn't a fountain complete with a stereotypically naked cupid.

" _When you get to the house, just press the intercom button and they'll buzz you right in,"_ the secretary had explained over the phone.

Since her new pupil's home turned out not to be that far from her own, she had skipped the car for the day and taken a bus. Now she idly thought to herself how uncool it looked to be standing in front of such huge gates without a car to roll in with.

She bent down and pressed the button on the intercom.

A bit of static popped from the speaker. _"Good day! How can I be of service?"_ the lively and overly-polite voice of a woman emerged from the other side. Truth be told, it made Sei jump back a little.

"Uh, good evening," Sei said. "I'm here to tutor…," and that's when she realized that she had never caught the kid's name. "This is the tutor speaking," she said instead, changing tactics.

"Oh? Oh! Perfect! I'll let you right in!"

In mere seconds, the gates whined open and Sei made her way through the walkway up to the door.

"Excuse me for intruding," she said politely, as soon as a middle-aged woman opened the door.

"Oh, not at all!" said the woman, who Sei guessed was the mother. "Come in, come in!"

Once they were in the light of the foyer, Sei could more clearly see the tight lines of the woman's stiff expression. It was like her smile had been painted on or carved out of wax—and not very well. For a split second, she even seemed to give Sei a disapproving glance as she got a good look at her.

Almost immediately, she was right back to her superficial politeness, though. "Come over here, Kin-kun!" she called out towards the hall, which was very dimly lit. "Your new tutor is here!"

When her son emerged from the shadows, Sei had to blink a few times to make sure she wasn't just seeing things.

She actually tilted her head to get a better look and stared hard, throwing her manners to the wayside.

 _No way._

"I'm Arisugawa Chieko," the woman said, bowing formally, "and this is my son, Arisugawa Kintarou."

Sei could only stand there and look at him, unable to speak. For his part, the younger Arisugawa also appeared at a loss for words. A look of realization had come over his face and his mouth dropped slightly as their gazes met.

Right there, in front of Sei—donning a button-down shirt and a pair of slacks that were much too formal—was the unmistakable shape of Alice, the girl from the bar. Through the guise of an awkward young man, she stared back at Sei with a pair of expressive eyes.


	3. Chapter 3: Ask Questions Later

**Chapter 3:** **Ask Questions Later**

For a split second, Sei's mind traveled back to the alleyway, back to that night.

 _"Uh, what's your name anyway?" Sei asked. "A moment ago we were sharing our germs with each other, so at the very least we should properly introduce ourselves, I guess._ _I'm Satou Sei, by the way."_

 _She looked up at Sei pleasantly. "My name is Alice. How do you do?"_

" _Howdy-do," Sei said, returning the greeting with a careless informality. Then she cleared her throat, glancing down the alleyway, out towards the main street. "Look, kid," she said, "I'm no good for you. You don't want to mess around with somebody like me, anyway. Let's just chalk it up to a silly mistake. No big deal. Nobody's fault."_

 _Alice looked down at the ground, shrugging a single shoulder. "If you say so." Another gust of wind blew through the alley, and she crossed her bare arms over her chest, tucking her fists between the creases of her elbows._

 _Sei stared a her for a few seconds, then sighed. "You look pretty cold in that sleeveless number you have on."_

" _Yeah, I really should have put on something warmer—but the weather's so unpredictable this time of year. And besides...most of my thicker clothes aren't as pretty."_

" _What you need to do is eat a sandwich. You hardly have any blubber to survive past the spring, you little bean pole."_

 _For the first time, Alice glared at her. Sei found that she privately considered it an accomplishment,_ _though_ _. There was just something about pushing girls' buttons that she liked more than anything else._

 _Well,_ almost _more than anything else._

" _All right," Sei said, "I'd hate to see you go home as a pile of goose flesh, so I'll tell you what—I have a sweater in my car. I'm parked in the garage just down the street. Follow me there and I'll lend it to you." She hesitantly reached out for Alice—not touching her, just guiding her towards the outside street._

 _On the way to the garage, she felt Alice hovering behind her, using her as a makeshift windshield whenever the air blew hard in their direction. The heat of her body, the sensation of her presence, or something else about her seemed to radiate towards Sei, filling Sei with a strange frustration she was not quite ready to acknowledge. She wanted to put an arm around her, to warm her up, to feel her skin pressed against her._

No _, Sei thought. And that was it._

 _The elevator ride up to the third floor of the garage was particularly tense, but as a few other people piled on and stood between them, things went a bit more smoothly._

 _When they reached Sei's car, she popped the trunk, and pulled out a cable-knit sweater that had been hanging out near her spare tire. She rustled it a few times to get the dust off, getting a whiff of rubber and stale motor oil._ Oh well, _Sei thought._ Better than nothing.

 _She unbuttoned the sweater and draped it over Alice's shoulders._ _It was a few sizes too big, and it made the girl look oddly small and defenseless._ _For a short, awkward, beautiful moment, their eyes accidentally met and the kindness of Sei's gesture seemed to temporarily shift into the realm of intimacy. It was of course not lost on_ _her_ _that this was something that lovers did._

 _She cleared her throat again, louder this time, loud enough that it echoed across the walls of the concrete garage. "Well," she said, then she stepped over to the driver's side door without saying anything else._

" _Wait." Alice held out a hand, reaching out to the empty air in front of her. "How do I give this back to you?"_

 _Sei looked at her for a moment in contemplation. Indeed, she hadn't thought this far ahead—a recurring theme that night, it seemed. After a few seconds, she merely shrugged dismissively. "You don't," she said._

" _What?"_

" _Just keep it. It's not like I can't get another one."_

 _Alice looked touched with gratitude, but a bit of concern tinged her face as well. "Are you sure?" she asked._

" _Yeah, no problem. I parked_ here _, after all, didn't I? You know these places cost like a gazillion yen per half-hour. What's an old sweater to me when I'm going to be in debt for the rest of my life for spending two hours here?" Sei scratched her chin. "Hm, maybe I can sneak around the boom gate somehow."_

" _Thank you!" Alice said, and the look on her face, the brightness in her eyes, made Sei forget all about the parking fees for a split second._

 _Then Sei turned back to her car and fiddled with her keys. "Yep," she said, and that was it._

 _She waited until Alice had meekly turned around and started walking back towards the elevators. She waited, and then she started banging her head lightly against the frame of her car, the sweat from her forehead making thin streak marks on the window._

 _Alice._

 _Alice._

 _Alice._

 _She mumbled her name with every deliberate tap._

You can go right to hell, Alice, _Sei thought._ Or to wonderland. Or to wherever the hell you came from.

* * *

"Arisu...gawa," Sei muttered under her breath.

Alice. Arisu. _Arisu_ gawa. It all suddenly made sense.

The two of them continued to gaze at each other for an awkward period of time, as if it were the first time they had ever seen another human being.

Alice's mother let out a nervous laugh. "Well, Kintarou, don't just stare at your new teacher like that! Invite her in, give her the house slippers!"

This "Kintarou" bowed dutifully, then crouched over the rise in the foyer to hand Sei her indoor shoes. Sei, for her part, stowed her shoes in a nearby cubbyhole and took the slippers from him. Their hands briefly touched during the exchange, and Alice seemed to recoil a little. Otherwise, they both went through the motions seamlessly, as if they had rehearsed for this play all their lives.

"Perfect," the elder Arisugawa-san said when Sei had stepped onto the main floor. "Now show her to your room, Kin-kun. You two can run along upstairs and I'll be right there with some tea." She disappeared into a different hallway from the one her son had emerged from, presumably headed for the kitchen.

The rather robotic Kintarou silently led Sei through the living room and up the first flight of stairs. In return, she said nothing at first, though her eyes did fall on his rear end at some point as he climbed above her on the steps. _Was this really the same body she had fondled only the week before?_

She could still remember what it had been like, could still remember the tastes and smells. Though Alice had been shy at first that night, her girlish energy had shined through her hesitation, and Sei's body had easily responded with lust.

Right now, though, as this Kintarou boy ascended the staircase, she felt absolutely nothing—no attraction, but also no repulsion or disgust—just nothing at all. From what she had seen downstairs, he still had a beautiful face, but the flame that had burned inside the both of them for those short minutes together in the alleyway had been decidedly smothered.

When they got to the top, the boy pushed the first door on the left open and stepped into a medium-sized room. Sei noticed that there weren't many furnishings, though. There was only a Western-style bed in the corner, a desk on the far wall, a bookcase, and a small Japanese low table near the middle of the room.

He sauntered over to the table and Sei followed him, dropping her handbag full of books on the carpeted floor. The thud seemed to startle the boy, and he jumped.

"Easy there," she said "Nobody's set off a bomb yet."

He looked at her. For a brief—very brief—moment, Sei thought she saw a spark of Alice once again in the kid's eyes. However, his face went blank immediately as his mother made her way through the doorway.

"Please help yourself to some tea, Satou-san!" she said, carefully placing a tray on the low table next to them. "Would you like me to pour it for you?"

"I'll pour it, Mother," Kintarou said, finally speaking for the first time. His mother looked at him in a moment of hesitation, and Sei could almost read her thoughts.

 _Pouring tea was a lady's job._

But pouring tea was anybody's job when you had a guest, and certainly Sei outranked him, so it was okay, right?

Arisugawa-san merely nodded and smiled that tight smile that she seemed to wear habitually. "Very well," she said, but she shot Kintarou a brief look of warning, as if to say: _Don't enjoy it too much._ After a moment of awkward silence, she exchanged bows with Sei and headed towards the door. "I'll let you two get to it. I'm sure you have lots to go over." Then she disappeared into the hallway.

Sei noticed with some amusement that she had indeed left the door open. _Guess that answers my earlier question._

Alice...or Kintarou...or someone knelt down by the low table and Sei followed suit. He poured Sei's tea with deliberate concentration, a soothing sound filling the room as the liquid hit the cup. When he was done, he poured his own, then stared silently at the rising steam without saying a word.

Sei glanced at the doorway, checking one last time for any sign of his mother. Now that the coast seemed clear enough, she turned back to him...or her...or whatever this person was. "So, 'Kin-kun'? Is that what they call you?" Sei whispered, trying to lighten the mood. "That doesn't even sound good. It's like 'King Kong' or something."

The Kintarou boy said nothing, staring at the vapor over the cup, seemingly waiting for his tea to cool down before taking a drink.

"Ah," Sei said after a moment. "I see we're still pretending we've never met each other. That's fine, I guess. I can't say that I can blame you."

"Satou-san," the boy said suddenly, his tone still overly formal. "How rude of me not to ask: do you like sugar?" He started to reach for the condiments on the other side of the tray.

The question sounded a little funny to Sei's ears at first, since her family name was pronounced the same way as the Japanese word for "sugar." She smiled a little. "Do _you_?" she asked, unable to resist an obvious chance to tease him.

He dropped the small dish of condiments with a loud clatter. There was finally a crack in his facade, albeit a small one. His eyebrow twitched a little and the corner of his mouth grew tight.

"I...I take mine unsweetened," he said, "but thank you for asking."

"Better to ask first," Sei said, staring right at his face as he tried to avoid her gaze, "than to give someone too much sugar and then ask questions later, right?"

A touch of pink started to color his cheeks, telling Sei that he was indeed human. However, the way he gripped his cup just then looked at little scary. He held it with both hands and his knuckles were turning pale. She had the distinct impression that he was considering throwing the contents in her face.

He took at sip. Perhaps it had only been her imagination, then.

Sei sighed deeply, pulling her eyes away from him and putting her hands around her teacup. _This could be a lot less tedious if only he would lighten up,_ she thought. After all, in the grand scheme of things, it was a funny situation. Once she was over it, it would be the sort of story she could tell over drinks and chuckle about in hindsight.

If he wanted nothing to do with her, that was fine—neither did she, in a way—but now that they were here, they may as well try to make things pleasant. It was easier now that her burning attraction for this person had seemed to wear thin, too. Maybe that other night had been a fluke.

"Alice," Sei began to say. She stopped when she saw a sudden panicked expression come over the boy.

He dragged his eyes slowly, very intentionally across the room until they were pointing directly at the empty doorway.

Sei followed his gaze and understood. _I see,_ she thought. _So the walls have ears._

She put her tea back down without taking a drink, and reached into her bag for a couple of books. As she spread one of the textbooks open in front of him, she leaned in a little closer, so that only he could possibly hear her. She whispered, "You don't have to pretend with me, Alice. I know what it's like to be different and to have to pretend that you're like everyone else. It's exhausting."

In that moment, Alice turned to look at her, and their gazes met straight on, their faces merely centimeters apart. Alice blushed more openly this time. Then Sei felt that glimmer of attraction erupting all of a sudden, and it grew to full intensity for a fraction of a second—and it disappeared when Alice broke away. It was like someone had violently struck a piece of iron against a rock, but there was no tinder to catch the sparks, so the flame died in an instant.

 _Jesus Christ,_ Sei thought. _I need to get away from this person. I need to leave before I—_

"So, I've been struggling a lot with vocabulary in particular, Satou-san," Kinatrou said, projecting his voice conspicuously. "I just can't remember all of the words. English has so many...colorful sounds."

Sei stared at him for a second, then she came to her senses quickly. _Right, English._ She was there to give the gift of English. She wondered momentarily why he was being so polite about the language's ridiculous pronunciation challenges, as if he were going to offend her personally by mentioning it.

"Well, uh, the key to remembering that kind of thing is sheer exposure," she responded, quickly shifting into the role of teacher. "As long as you expose yourself to English every day, eventually…."

As the night wore on, Sei found that once she got into the swing of things, it became easier to ignore the giant 800-pound gorilla in the room. Actually, there were two gorillas: the one that screeched about how this "Kintarou" fellow was very obviously a girl, and the one that sang songs about how Sei was pretending not to want her. Occasionally, the gorillas waltzed around the room, stepping between them, making Sei lean back a little or making Alice avoid her gaze.

All in all, they both did an admirable job of ignoring the obvious, Sei thought. When the time came for the tutoring to be over, Sei couldn't help but feel overcome with the desperate need to leave. Without the lessons as a distraction, she didn't think she could survive the small talk.

Kintarou's mother poked her head through the door before long, smiling at the both of them. "How did everything go? Splendidly, I imagine?" The derision she had shown towards Sei before emanated from her eyes again, barely disguised by her bubbly demeanor.

As the three of them walked down the stairs to the first floor, Sei racked her brain for some kind of excuse as to why she would be unable to come for the next tutoring session. Or the next. Or ever again.

Her daydreaming was cut short, however, when they came to the foyer. Standing just inside the house, leaning against the wall and stepping into his house slippers, was the boy's father. He looked up at Sei and smiled.

"Well, well, can my son chatter like an American yet?" he asked, giving a hearty laugh. "Did you perform that miracle I asked?"

"Not exactly," Kintarou responded for her.

His father patted him on the back. "Don't worry, son, you'll get there soon enough. I have full confidence in your tutor; she comes with splendid references."

Sei bowed politely and told them that she needed to get going. As she stepped down into the foyer and started changing her shoes, the man leaned down towards her and whispered, "Thank you, Satou. You don't realize how much of a help this is. It's extremely important that our son become fluent."

He pressed a wad of paper into her hand, and Sei rudely stuffed it into her shirt pocket without looking at it, thanking him quietly. Once they had exchanged goodbyes and she was just about to step out the door, she heard the father calling after his son: "Hey, wait a second, Kintarou. Don't run upstairs just yet. Your tutor hasn't even left! Why don't you walk her to the gate?"

Apparently, Sei hadn't been the only one trying to escape.

As they walked side-by-side down the concrete path, and the door closed behind them, Sei could see from the corner of her eye that the kid was trying to steal a glance at her inconspicuously. She jammed her hands into her pockets and let out a breath, turning to look at this oddly frustrating person.

Alice looked back her. It was unquestionably Alice this time. Her real face was somehow bursting through the facade again, though Sei couldn't really put her finger on what the differences were between now and earlier—they were stark, nonetheless. The girl echoed Sei's previous sigh and shrugged her shoulders, as if to say that the situation was out of her hands.

"I'm sorry," Alice said.

"For what?"

"Back there." Alice shook her head. "In there, in that house, I can't be who I am. It's impossible. It isn't even about whether I'm a girl or a boy. No matter what I am, they don't want it. And my mother, she's always making sure I never forget it."

Sei stopped for a moment and regarded her with a soft gaze of understanding. "You won't be in that house forever, you know," she said. "When you finally do leave, what's going to happen to you if you never learned how to be yourself?"

"Well, I can't wear dresses around here for now."

"It's not about wearing dresses," Sei said. She paused, a small grin forming on her face. "Girls wear pants sometimes, too, Alice."

Alice smiled back at her, then looked at the ground. "My mother doesn't like you."

Sei nearly burst out laughing. "Gee, you don't say! I hadn't noticed."

"Normally, she doesn't like women around my age very much. She thinks that they're too...loose and wanton with their lives. But I could tell right away that she _really_ didn't like you," Alice said. "Maybe she sensed that you were a little different—a bit like me."

"Maybe so. It's hard to turn that off, even around older people. It's not like I hide it."

Sei turned to the gates as they started to open, and waved at Alice casually as she headed towards them. Alice took a hesitant step forward, as if to walk up to her, as if to touch her, but Sei ignored the gesture and walked a little faster.

 _Nope,_ she thought. _We're not playing that game again, Alice._

It was only when she had walked a few blocks towards the bus station that she thought to pull the folded stack of cash from her pocket. Curiously, she spread the bills apart in her hand to take a look at how much Alice's father had given her.

Sei stopped in the middle of the street. _It's just money,_ she reminded herself. _That's all. Just money. You can always make more somewhere else._

Still, it was much more than she had made anywhere else so far. It was enough for her to park at her favorite garage downtown for a few weeks straight.

* * *

"So, how did the first tutoring session go with that student that Kawakami recommended?" Kei asked with mild interest, prodding at her soup with a plastic spoon. It looked too hot to drink from yet, a haze of steam billowing from the bowl. "What was his name again?"

"Arisugawa Kintarou," Sei mumbled. She was flipping through a magazine and shoving clumps of rice into her mouth in a most unrefined manner.

Kei looked at her with a bit of surprise. "Wow. It's not very often that I hear someone's name coming out of your mouth with zero hesitation. Are you turning over a new leaf and actually remembering people now?" She paused. "Or did he make that big of an impression?"

Sei shrugged at her, her gaze wandering vaguely to the other people who were milling around the cafeteria. She had been trying to put the whole ordeal out of her mind for the past day-and-a-half, but now that it was Wednesday, she'd have to come to some sort of decision as to whether she would return to the Arisugawa house or not.

On the one hand, the pay was very good, and a man with connections like the senior Arisugawa would mean access to other high-paying clients, probably.

But on the other hand…

On the other hand, there was Alice. There was something inexplicable that was tugging Sei towards her, some kind of black magic, some kind of intense curiosity that she simply couldn't dismiss. It stimulated her and scared her at the same time, and it made her want to avoid the place.

It was an irrational fear, though, wasn't it? Nothing could ever really happen between them. Even if Sei allowed these weird feelings to run their course, they could only go so far. After all, Alice was…

Sei thought she heard someone calling her name. She looked in front of her at Kei, but it didn't seem to come from her. Kei wasn't even looking at her. Her gaze was falling somewhere over Sei's shoulder and a smile was spreading across her face—the kind of smile that would have never been meant for Sei.

"Hello there, Fukuzawa-san," Kei said, though her face grew a bit less bright as she seemed to study the space behind Sei's back.

Sei turned around immediately, and was met with a pair of brown eyes. They looked at little watery, puffier than usual. Yumi didn't even have to say anything as they quietly exchanged a glance.

 _Sachiko_ , Sei guessed.

"Sei-sama," Yumi repeated, standing up straight, seemingly trying to compose herself. "Could I speak to you in private?"

Sei didn't even push in her chair as she got up. She took Yumi's hand and led her outside, then brought her along the walkway to a grassy spot near the back of the library, where few people ever wandered.

She sat down beside a tree and patted the ground next to her. Yumi hesitated—perhaps noting the clods of dirt over the turf that Sei had completely ignored—but finally she sighed and sat right down. Leaning her back against the tree, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand as fresh tears began to spill.

Strange. There was no sobbing, no shudders racking her body, as Sei was used to when Yumi cried. The tears only seemed to fall as a reflex, without conflict, without violence.

"What's wrong, Yumi-chan?" She reached over and wiped a few tears with her thumb, but otherwise she didn't coddle her.

Yumi took a deep, shaky breath. "Onee-sama invited me over to her house today. At first I thought she just wanted to hang out like we usually do, but then...she brought me up to her bedroom. She wanted to talk."

Sei only listened, turning her body towards Yumi, watching her eyes carefully.

"She's marrying Kashiwagi-san after university. It's been decided," Yumi said.

"Yes, I know. Youko mentioned it to me. But you knew that already, too, didn't you?"

Yumi nodded. "It wasn't a shock or anything; I had figured that she wouldn't have changed her mind. She told me that they had already started making plans for the wedding now, that she had a certain familial duty to fulfill, that Kashiwagi-san would make a good husband because they had an understanding with each other."

Sei frowned deeply. Surely, she thought, Yumi hadn't been expecting that Sachiko would turn her back on her family and derail her plans just to...what? To run away with Yumi? Was that it? A bittersweet feeling of nostalgia came over Sei for a moment as memories flooded her head. She had tried that once herself, and it didn't work out very well.

"This is just the way things are, Yumi-chan," Sei said, trying to console her with a smile. "Relationships are always temporary, or else they transform in ways we might have not expected or wanted. This doesn't mean that they don't mean anything while we have them, or that they haven't changed our lives for the better."

Sei stared out across the gardens wistfully. It was true, though, that the kinds of relationships that people like them tended to have were far more fleeting and temporary. She couldn't blame Yumi for her frustration, especially considering that her relationship with Sachiko was also the kind that could never be consummated.

She sometimes wondered if Sachiko was aware of Yumi's feelings and was simply ignoring them, or if she really was so blind as to assume that Yumi's intentions were completely platonic.

"It's not that," Yumi said, putting her face in her hands. "Onee-sama told me she had called me up to her room to ask me something—something about our future."

"Hm?" Sei was a bit confused now.

Yumi sucked in a sharp breath. "She asked me if I wanted to live with them. After they were married and after I graduated. She wanted to know if I would consider staying in the Ogasawara home, living like an adopted family member."

Sei was immediately taken aback. Without Yumi even having to explain, she knew exactly what it all implied. It was just something she had never expected from Sachiko.

Sachiko wanted a sham marriage. She wanted the same thing that Kashiwagi did. Now that she had a reason to do it and a person that she could do it with, she apparently had no qualms.

Sei looked directly into Yumi's face. "She wants...to take you as a lover?"

Yumi tightened her lip, but fresh tears appeared seemingly against her will. "At first, I wasn't sure if that's what she meant. You know how she can be so vague about this kind of thing," Yumi said. "Eventually, she told me a bit more clearly, when I acted confused. She said that I could sleep in the same room with her, in the same bed, if I wanted. _If I wanted_." Yumi smiled mirthlessly. "That's when I knew what she was implying. The look on her face just confirmed it. She wouldn't even look at me while she said it. It was all so weird."

"Have you two ever…?" Sei ventured to ask. Her expression filled in the blank.

Yumi shook her head. "We had never even kissed at that point."

"'At that point'? You mean, a few hours ago?"

Yumi sighed. It was a gesture of exasperation, but at the same time a blush had begun to crawl up her face. "I hadn't kissed anyone before." She paused, then looked at Sei. "Do you remember that time?"

Again, she didn't need to explain. Sei knew exactly what "time" she was talking about, just by the tint on Yumi's cheeks. She was talking about the time that she had kissed Sei in the empty classroom, right before Sei's graduation.

"You asked me for a kiss on the lips," Yumi said. "I wasn't totally certain whether or not you were serious. To be perfectly honest, I kind of wanted to do it, but the main thing that was holding me back was…."

"It would have been your first kiss."

Yumi nodded. "So instead, I kissed you on the cheek."

"You got the side of my mouth, too. I felt it," Sei teased.

" _I kissed you on the cheek,_ " Yumi repeated, her lips pursed. "And I decided, because of that, it didn't count. Though I'll admit that I felt a little guilty that I was 'cheating' on Onee-sama back then." Yumi pulled her knees up to her chest. "I guess I was saving the _real_ kiss for her all this time."

It really was a tragedy, Sei thought. Here she was—this bright, adorable girl on the brink of adulthood—and she had never even kissed anyone. Nineteen years old, and she had been saving herself for someone who didn't even notice her romantic feelings.

Or so it seemed until about five minutes ago. Perhaps Sei had been wrong.

"When we were in her room today," Yumi continued, "After she told me all of that, I just didn't know how to react. I just stood there, frozen, confused. Then she took my face in her hands, like she had done a bunch of times before. It was different this time, though. She looked right at me, with an expression I hadn't seen on her face in so long. She had been so caught up in the conflicts of the engagement, she had been so distant from me lately—and that's when I realized that the real conflict inside her had been about approaching me and asking me to live with her. I can't even imagine how long she must have been wrestling with herself."

Then Yumi looked away, her expression taking on a new layer of embarrassment. "After a second, she kind of leaned in a little. Just a little. And I don't know what came over me—I was so overwhelmed with everything—but I leaned the rest of the way and we kissed. I'm not sure if that had been her intention, but she didn't stop me. It was short, just a light kiss. Her lips were smooth and warm...and she smiled at me when we pulled away."

Sei stared at her, transfixed. She could hardly believe it. "Well, it seems that you got what you wanted," she mumbled. She said it in a tone that seemed to ask: _What's the problem, then, Yumi-chan?_

Yumi shook her head. "Do you know what it was like to kiss my Onee-sama?"

Sei said nothing, only waited.

"It was like...kissing my own sister." Yumi looked up at Sei, not a shred of irony in her voice.

Sei suppressed a sardonic laugh, and it erupted out of her as a fit of loud snickers instead.

Yumi glared at her, then pressed her forehead to her own knees and covered her face with her folded arms. "It's not funny, Sei-sama. It's awful."

Sei nodded, trying to throw her an understanding glance, but Yumi wasn't looking at her anymore. It was true, she thought: it _was_ awful. Yumi had carried a torch for this woman for years and years, building her up in her mind, masochistically enduring the pain of having her seething passions ignored—only to find that the flame of the torch had fizzled by the time her love was returned. Or maybe she had only just discovered that what she felt for Sachiko had never actually been physical attraction the whole time.

"Ah, but that's how love is," Sei said. At first, she had intended to say it only in her mind, but it had come out freely nonetheless. She smiled and patted Yumi warmly on the shoulder. "That's why you have to move fast, Yumi! Then at least you'll know early on. Kiss first, ask a lifetime of questions later!"

" _Like you?_ " Yumi's pretty little face peaked out from under her arm. Her tone was not friendly. There was more than a touch of bitterness, but Sei forgave it easily.

Sei stretched her legs out in front of her, folding her arms behind her head and looking out into the open lawn pensively.

But she didn't answer.

"Are you still in love with her?" Sei asked instead.

Yumi shrugged, hiding her face again. "You can't just turn off almost four years of feelings. Of course I still love her—but the moment she had asked me to be part of some secret marriage, I just couldn't see myself with her anymore. The reality of the situation—of what being with her would actually mean on a day to day basis—just became too clear. It wasn't a fantasy anymore, where I could pretend that everything would be perfect. If that kiss said anything to me, it was that she wanted to have this semi-romance, the same one we've been having for years—to be _not quite_ lovers." She swallowed hard. "I guess I've just grown past that. I'd like to experience what it's like to have an _actual_ lover. Even if I misread her and she wanted a normal romance somehow, I don't think I could spend years and years hiding the relationship."

"It wouldn't be hard to hide," Sei said. "You could live with her, even sleep in the same bed, and no one would bat an eyelash. Hardly anyone would think that you were anything other than good friends, and even those who suspected probably wouldn't say anything about it." Sei paused. "But you don't want to live like that, do you?"

Yumi shook her head. "It's not that I want to tell the whole world who I'm with or anything," she said. "I just don't want to have to hide it, either, like it's some huge secret."

"You don't want to be like Kashiwagi...or now Sachiko, too, I guess."

"No, I don't," Yumi agreed. She finally looked up at Sei again. "Kashiwagi was there today. He gave me this funny look before I went to Onee-sama's room. I think he knew what she was going to say to me. I can't see them discussing the implications openly, but she had to have told him that she was going to ask me to live with them."

"I'm surprised he hasn't already amassed a collection of his own young lovers in that house yet," Sei huffed.

Yumi stared a her for a long moment, her face suddenly a bit tense.

"What is it?" Sei asked.

"Well, it's funny you should say that," she said cautiously, watching Sei's face with a strange level of attention. "Someone was with him there today. They were on their way out the door—going to the arcade, he said—but there was a weird air about the two of them."

Sei became serious. "'Someone'?"

Yumi looked down at her now grass-stained shoes. "It was Alice."

* * *

 _A/N:_

 _Hey, guys, thanks so far for the reviews, I really appreciate the feedback! Even the lurkers, thanks for taking the time to read my story. :)_

 _Next chapter should be up soon...probably._


	4. Chapter 4: Surrender

**Chapter 4:** **Surrender**

"Sei-sama!"

Yumi's scream erupted from some primal place inside of her, some dark void where all of her mortal fears lurked. She reached helplessly around the car and eventually managed to take hold of the grip handle above her as her body jostled back and forth. In spite of herself, she had almost forgotten all about Sachiko as she faced the specter of certain death.

"Sorry, sorry!" Sei shouted back, though she was grinning from ear to ear. "Did you see that guy back there, though? He almost ran into me!"

"I think you have it the other way around!"

Even years after Sei had gotten her driver's license, her driving hadn't seemed to improve much. If anything, she appeared to have become more brazen now that she was used to putting her life on the line every time she got behind the wheel of a car.

 _And now she's risking_ my _life, too_ , thought Yumi. _And maybe the lives of those pedestrians over here._

"Sei-sama! Sei-sama, do you see the crosswalk? There's a crosswalk over there! There's—"

"I see it, I see it!" Sei said, blowing past a few people. "Those folks were _way_ on the other side. Relax." She stole a glance at Yumi, which only served to make Yumi more nervous because she wasn't keeping her eyes on the road. "Where is this place supposed to be, anyway? Which arcade is it?"

"I'm not sure, but I think it might be the one across from this ice cream shop I go to now and again," Yumi managed to say while suppressing the urge to point out all of the hazards that Sei seemed to be ignoring. "My brother Yuuki goes there sometimes, so it would be my best guess."

"Great, show me the way, Yumi-chan!"

She turned a corner sharply when Yumi told her they had to take the next street, and Yumi's stomach lurched accordingly.

"Sei-sama," she said pleadingly. "Why are we going there, anyway? What's gotten into you?"

"Whaaat? You don't want to save your friend from the hands of Kashiwagi Suguru?" Sei exclaimed in her usual exaggerated fashion.

"Are you talking about Alice?" Yumi looked at her with confusion. "How do you know she wants to be 'saved'? I'm sure she's hanging out with him for a reason. Besides, I would have thought you'd be trying to avoid her after…."

"Oh, come now, Yumi-chan. Do I look like the type of person who feels awkward after a failed romantic encounter?" Sei reached over and tousled Yumi's hair. "There's never been any awkwardness between you and me, after all, has there?"

"In _your_ opinion," Yumi said, pulling back to avoid her hand. "But fine, even if you don't feel awkward seeing her again, why bother? Why do you care?" Yumi could remember how serious Sei had become—a rare occurrence—the moment she had mentioned that it was Alice who Kashiwagi had been with.

"I'm just trying to do you a favor, Yumi-chan. I know you're worried about her, or you wouldn't have even said anything to me."

"To be honest, I've been trying to avoid her myself, actually," Yumi admitted.

"What? Why?"

"After you told me that insane story, how was I supposed to look in her eyes and not imagine you and her...together?"

Sei laughed out loud, barreling down the road as Yumi muttered her next instruction. "Good call. Maybe it _is_ better that you spare her your hundred faces."

When they made it to the arcade, Sei parked on a side street—legally or not, Yumi wasn't sure. Yumi followed her in disbelief as Sei practically skipped down the sidewalk to the entrance of the game center.

"It's been awhile since I've been in one of these," Sei said, then grabbed Yumi by the wrist and pulled her in.

The icy atmosphere of the air conditioned arcade blasted Yumi in the face immediately, making her wince a little. It took her a second to adjust, and she only thought to move from in front of the automatic doors when she felt people coming in behind her.

"C'mon!" Sei shouted, flashing her a broad smile and tugging her along the closest row of game cabinets.

"How are we ever going to find them in a place like this?" Yumi asked. She looked around the expanse of rail shooters, generic dancing games, pachinko machines, and all other manner of low-brow entertainment.

The people who were standing around seemed to whip by like mere streaks as Sei pulled her; she didn't even have a chance to excuse herself when she brushed against them. It almost seemed to make time slow down in a weird way, and all she could see clearly was Sei's back, a long arm extending behind her, leading to the hand that had captured Yumi's wrist. Underneath, Sei's legs galloped in joyous abandon.

 _I love this woman._

Yumi furrowed her brow. The thought had come seemingly out of nowhere—but it was true. It wasn't surprising or anything. It was something that she already knew very well, but the thought had never spontaneously arisen and expressed itself quite so clearly before. Otherwise, it was a mundane feeling, it had a tone that said, _"Of course."_ The thought didn't make her want to do anything, and it didn't make her want Sei to do anything, either.

It was almost as if she were surrendering—to what, she wasn't sure—perhaps to Sei, perhaps to the circumstances. Her mind had said: _Okay, I give up. I love you._

 _What a strange time and place to think this_ , Yumi thought as she struggled to keep up.

They came to a screeching halt very suddenly near the claw machines, and when Yumi snapped out of her dreaminess she could immediately see why. Sure enough, there was Kashiwagi. He had his arm around a much shorter person, a person who was fruitlessly trying to pinch a stuffed panda between the talons of the metal crane.

"Those things are a waste of money," Sei said to them in her typical way of forgoing any attempt at introduction. "You'd have better luck playing pachinko."

Kashiwagi turned his head first, then Alice followed suit. The elder's face seemed to contort in mild surprise for a second, but he quickly recovered.

"Look carefully, Alice," he said, leaning towards her, though he was clearly speaking to Sei by proxy. "That is the face of an uncultured woman. Guard yourself properly from her influence if you don't want to end up being one of those people who throws recyclables in the regular trash and wears their outdoor shoes inside."

"Huh?" Alice said, a bit startled, but when she finally saw Sei and Yumi standing there, a strong blush rose up into her ears.

Yumi noticed with a bit of surprise that Sei seemed to be gritting her teeth, that her body was tense as if she were holding back from some kind of forward motion. She and Alice were looking each other directly in the eyes, and Sei's stare was filled with a barely-disguised violence.

 _Oh,_ Yumi thought. She looked back and forth between them. _I see._

So Sei liked Alice. That's what it had been.

She thought it was a bit stupid that she hadn't realized it before. Maybe her mind had made too many assumptions and she had taken Sei's dismissive attitude at face value. Why _wouldn't_ Sei find Alice attractive, anyway? She was basically her type—well, except for the whole "body of a man" thing. Certainly, even after realizing Alice's predicament, she couldn't just turn off the way she felt. Yumi could understand that.

The intensity between them, though—that spoke of something else. Yumi wasn't really the perceptive type, but even she could notice it. Something else had happened besides their encounter at the bar, something that had stoked the fire and frustrated them both, but Yumi could only guess what it might have been.

"Hmm, what's going on?" Kashiwagi said aloud, echoing Yumi's thoughts. He seemed to have noticed something strange as well, but otherwise he was totally confused, and Yumi wasn't sure who he was addressing when he asked. Not long after he said it, he looked over at Sei. "What a fine coincidence that we've run into each other today, Satou-san. Good afternoon." He glanced a Yumi. "Nice to see you again today, Yumi-chan." He winked at her.

Yumi couldn't help but think of how—in the grand scheme of things—Kashiwagi and Sei were actually a lot alike. Maybe that's why they seemed to hate each other's guts.

"What are you two doing here?" Sei asked, again quite rudely. Yumi could never fully get over how presumptuous she always was. No wonder everyone tended to assume that she was foreign.

Kashiwagi actually laughed. "How uncouth! We're here for the same reason as you two, I imagine? Or did you come here to find us?"

"We came because we...needed Alice-kun for something," Yumi interjected, before Sei could respond. She stepped forward, and noticed that Sei relaxed slightly beside her.

Kashiwagi raised an eyebrow. "And what, exactly, do you need her for? We're having a grand old time on our own."

"Satou-san is my English tutor," Alice said, finally speaking up. "We have lessons this evening. She was just coming to pick me up—it's nearly time."

Yumi recoiled a bit in surprise. She wondered if that was true or if Alice had made it all up on the fly. At any rate, it was an unexpected save; Alice did seem a bit uncomfortable with Kashiwagi, now that she took a good look at her.

Kashiwagi seemed to accept the excuse nonetheless. Whether this was because he believed her or because he had no intention of prodding further, Yumi wasn't sure. "I'll tell you what," he said to Sei. "Get me that panda from the claw machine, and you can take Alice-kun right away. If you can't, then I keep her for another hour."

"You want a stuffed panda that badly?" Sei asked.

"At first it was just a casual desire—but we've been trying to get it out for the past fifteen minutes, so now it's personal."

Yumi completely understood. The moment you put even a single coin in one of those machines, it usually meant a commitment of at least a few hundred yen. The closer the prize got to the exit slot, the more painful it was to quit, even if the prize itself wasn't even worth it.

Kashiwagi reached over to the console of the machine and pressed the button to release the claw, since Alice had seemed to lose interest. Everyone stared as the claw dropped down, lightly caressing the panda's rear end, as if it were coyly flirting, before rising back up the track completely empty-handed, then spreading open over the exit chute without a prize.

Yumi always thought that the way these claw machines pretended to drop invisible prizes in the end only served to mock you into angrily shoving more coins in the slot. Apparently it had worked this time, at least.

Kashiwagi stepped back, pushing Alice gently behind him. He gestured towards the machine in invitation.

Yumi noticed Sei take on a determined look just then. Before long, she was pushing past the three of them and settling in front of the machine, reaching into her pants pocket for a few coins.

 _It's because she's competing with Kashiwagi-san,_ Yumi thought. Sometimes she wondered if they secretly liked each other. She could actually almost imagine them sitting in a cafe, shooting the breeze over tea, then quickly pretending to hate each other the moment someone familiar walked by.

They were birds of a feather, after all. Yumi could even remember the first time Sei had mentioned it. They had been running around looking for Sachiko and Kashiwagi when the two had disappeared together during the rehearsals for _Cinderella_ back in Yumi's first year of high school. As they tripped over ginkgo nuts, Sei told her that she had trusted Kashiwagi, that she had assumed he wouldn't put any moves on Sachiko because she had an _instinct_ about him. They were the same kind of person, Sei had explained, and that's how she knew.

At the time, Yumi hadn't realized that Sei was telling her that Kashiwagi was homosexual—and that, by the way, Sei was too. It was only during the _Forest of Thorns_ incident that she had put two and two together, and realized that Sei was...that kind of person.

Then again, Yumi had no right to think of them as "those kinds of people" anymore. It had taken her a little longer to figure it out, but after all Yumi was one of them.

"You're gripping that rather expertly, Satou-san. It's a little suspicious, considering your usual proclivities," Kashiwagi said while he watched Sei manipulating the joystick.

It took Yumi a second to realize what he was implying, but as soon as she did, she was immediately scandalized. Both she and Alice started blushing at the same time.

Sei, however, didn't miss a beat, her eyes trained on the awkwardly-placed prize in the glass chamber. "You say that, Kashiwagi," she said, omitting the honorific as was her custom with him, "but I saw the way you caressed the trigger button with your fingers. I could have sworn I saw a wave of sensual nostalgia fill your face. Was that a wistful sigh I heard, too?"

Yumi had to look away, her face burning. She just couldn't believe what they were saying, right out in the open where people could hear—those two really brought out the worst in each other.

 _At least my suspicions are confirmed,_ Yumi thought. _They're obviously friends._

Somehow, this notion seemed even more distasteful to Yumi than the way they were teasing each other.

When Sei finally dropped the claw, it opened its metal fingers like a hungry mouth, enveloping the panda in its entirety. Through some apparent miracle, it grasped the bear without its usual weak touch and started to lift it towards the exit chute.

Everyone held their breath.

At the last moment, right before the toy had cleared the edge, the grip of the machine loosened. The panda suddenly slipped down to the ends of the claw, so that it was hanging only by its tiny foot.

Sei swore—in English, Yumi noted with some amusement—and pressed her face close to the glass. The claw dragged the bear slowly across the last patch of toys that blocked part of the exit. For a few seconds, the prize teetered on the edge.

Then it fell down the chute with a satisfying plop.

"Ha-ha!" Sei shouted, throwing her hands up. "On the first try, too!"

"Yes, after we had moved it closer for you," Kashiwagi grumbled.

Even so, he released Alice to Sei's custody without much of a fight, and then began to wander off to waste his money on some other machine. Before they started to leave him, though, he turned around and shot Sei one last look.

"If you're planning on starting a harem, Satou-san," he said, "then you're going about it all wrong."

She didn't seem irritated at all with what he said. Instead, she threw her arms around both Yumi's and Alice's shoulders, and replied, "Like you would know, Kashiwagi?"

It was only when they reached the car that Yumi wondered to herself why Kashiwagi hadn't seemed to mention or even imply anything about her talk with Sachiko. Maybe he had assumed it had all gone well? Perhaps he just didn't think that it was any of his business.

If that was the case, then he was right.

Sei walked over to the passenger side and pulled the door open, giving both of the girls in front of her a questioning look. Yumi, realizing what was happening, smiled to herself and gave Alice a little nudge towards the open door. Alice said nothing, but she was blushing furiously as she obediently sat down.

 _Those two need to work something out between them,_ Yumi thought—though of course, she doubted that they would do so in front of her. She was more curious about how they would behave when they were side-by-side and couldn't escape each other. After all, with the exception of the festival play a few years before, which didn't count because they were totally unaware that the other existed, she had never even seen them in the same place together until now.

Sei's driving was oddly subdued as she sped down the street. She was still taking unnecessary risks, in Yumi's opinion, but there was a slight bit of deliberate tension when she would flip on her turning signal or when she'd come to a stop at a light. It was almost as if her mind was on something else, so her body was trying to compensate by being a bit more cautious automatically.

She had grown a bit more quiet, too.

"So," Yumi said suddenly, from the back seat.

Alice jumped at little at the sudden break in the silence.

"Where are we going now, Sei-sama?" Yumi finished asking, placing a comforting hand on Alice's shoulder.

Sei flashed Yumi one of her mysterious smiles through the rear-view mirror. "We're going somewhere to celebrate Yumi-chan's liberation."

"Liberation?" Yumi asked, completely bewildered. "From what?"

"From the thorny vines of love, of course."

* * *

"Wow, what a beautiful landscape," Alice whispered in awe. The garden spread out before the three of them, and it indeed looked impressive on this early spring evening. The buds of future flowers were just starting to emerge, and Yumi noticed what looked like a hedge of roses that she couldn't remember seeing the last time she had come. The last time, it was because…

Yes, that's right. Yumi could remember it now. She had a nasty habit of somehow only showing up at Katou Kei's place whenever she was having a spat with her Onee-sama. True that this time, it wasn't exactly a spat—just a sad realization—but it still wasn't exactly fair to keep offering Katou-san her worst self, was it? Didn't she deserve better?

When they wandered through the front gate, Sei turned to the both of them. "Yumiko-san is familiar with my face by now, since I'm always over here, and I'm sure she remembers cute little Yumi-chan." Sei gave her a smile that filled Yumi's chest with a warm sensation—quite against her will.

Then Sei turned to Alice. "The landlady here doesn't allow men," Sei explained to her. She studied Alice for a moment, raking her eyes up and down her body and scratching her chin. "I think you'll pass as female, though. Your clothes are androgynous enough today, and your face is downright feminine as usual. Truth be told, Yumiko-san probably thought I was a boy when she first saw me, anyway."

Yumi could see that. Back then was around the time when Sei first started wearing her hair very short, along with casual clothes, since she no longer was required to wear the Lillian uniform. Combined with her rather handsome features, Yumiko-san might have had reservations when watching from far away.

"So I'll head over and ask permission," Sei said. "You two wait here. If she wants to talk to you, just bow and play along with the usual pleasantries. Once she hears your voice, she'll know for sure that you're a girl."

Yumi watched as Sei headed towards the main building of the grounds. S _he'll know for sure that you're a girl,_ Yumi repeated in her mind. She found it interesting that Sei had said that Yumiko-san would _know_ that Alice was a girl, not that she would _think_ that Alice was a girl. The distinction was subtle, but it was important.

Even if Sei had no intention of acting on the feelings she obviously had, Yumi couldn't help but feel happy that Alice at least seemed to have a friend who was understanding. It would have been easy for Sei to dismiss Alice's claims that she was a girl, to wave it away like many people did and insist that it was all in her head.

That casual generosity, that quiet acknowledgement of other people's true selves—the kind that was never offered with any expectations—was precisely one of the things she liked most about Sei. It also made her annoyingly perceptive, though, even when you were trying to keep something from her.

When Sei showed up again, it seemed that formal introductions weren't necessary. Yumi looked over and saw that the old landlady Yumiko-san was peaking at her from between her white curtains. Yumi bowed as usual, and the woman smiled at her, then disappeared.

Sei led the two of them through the path in the garden and up to Katou Kei's door. Suddenly, Yumi realized something.

"Sei-sama," she said. "I don't remember seeing you give Katou-san a call earlier about visiting her. Did you guys already have plans? Are we intruding?"

"You're not intruding."

"Were you guys planning on meeting today?" Yumi repeated, getting increasingly suspicious that Sei was just dropping in without notice.

"No," Sei said. "But I figure she's here. She's probably done with that soup by now."

Yumi's eyes widened. "That's right!" she said. "I forgot all about that."

They had left the university cafeteria in such a hurry, that she remembered Sei hadn't even cleaned up her plate. It hadn't been a big deal at the time, because the assumption was that they would be returning in a few minutes, but after Yumi had told Sei about Kashiwagi, they had unthinkingly raced to Alice's rescue.

 _How inconsiderate!_ Yumi thought. She covered her face with her hands as she imagined Katou-san grudgingly cleaning up Satou Sei-sama's mess. Worst of all, it had all been Yumi's fault! She had been so distracted by what happened with her onee-sama, that she couldn't even remember if she had properly greeted Katou-san.

"Relax, Yumi-chan," Sei said, and she threw her a knowing glance. She had obviously been reading Yumi's varied expressions. "It'll be all right. Katou-san isn't the type to hold grudges about this kind of thing."

"She seems to hold plenty of grudges against you," Yumi mumbled.

Sei grinned. "That's because I deserve them."

She knocked on the thin door and before long, it creaked open. Katou Kei immediately gave Sei an irritated glare, then looked curiously over at Yumi and Alice.

"Fukuzawa-san," Katou-san said, ignoring Sei completely, "who's your friend? She's cute."

Alice blushed and offered a meek little bow, a gesture that somehow came off as a curtsy.

Sei smirked at her, then turned to Katou-san. "This is Alice," she said. Katou-san didn't comment on the lack of a family name, and simply let them all inside.

Before long, they were seated at the low table, while Sei was over by the small kitchenette, setting up the tea. Yumi imagined Sei was serving them all, instead of the host, as a silent way of apologizing.

Or maybe it was just in line with her natural tendency to help herself, instead of just asking for what she wanted.

Sei brought the tray of tea over and poured the drinks. When it was Alice's turn, they both would not look at each other. Sei pushed the cup towards Alice, and their fingers brushed momentarily. It was only then that Sei locked her in a brief gaze, and Alice's breath seemed to hitch subtly.

It was something most people wouldn't have noticed—but Yumi was watching very carefully. When she looked up at Katou Kei, she realized that she had been observing them, too.

"There's something you're not telling me, Satou," Katou-san said, looking over at Sei.

"Hm?" Sei murmured with obviously feigned disinterest, holding her teacup with one hand and bringing it to her mouth.

Katou-san glanced at Alice. "Is this your girlfriend or something?" she asked bluntly.

Yumi nearly choked on her tea when she heard that, sputtering and coughing, as much as she tried to suppress it. Immediately, it caused a chain reaction, Sei also nearly choking on her tea—but with laughter.

"Look, your rude behavior is rubbing off on your kohai now," Katou-san said to Sei, but she was smiling pleasantly and she waved off Yumi's numerous apologies. Alice simply looked on in amusement.

Once she was sufficiently recovered, Sei shook her head. "No, no. Alice is a...former school friend of Yumi-chan's, you could say."

"Oh, from Lillian Academy?" Katou-san looked at the three of them, obviously a bit annoyed that everyone else had the air of knowing something that she didn't.

"But Alice is friends with Sei-sama, too," Yumi couldn't help but chime in, "even though they just met recently. We rescued her from a creepy senpai today."

"Wouldn't that be you, though?" Katou-san said, turning to Sei.

Sei only smiled in return. "None of that's important," she said. "The only thing that matters is that yet another one has joined the ranks of us free people! Hurrah!" She held up her teacup as if she were giving a toast.

"Who, Alice-san?" Katou-san asked.

"Why, no, Yumi-chan has awoken from love's spell today. You could say she was like sleeping beauty."

Yumi groaned in embarrassment. "Sei-sama, I don't need the whole world to know about—"

"Did a prince on a white horse come to deliver true love's kiss, then?" Katou-san asked over Yumi's loud complaints.

Sei started to laugh, glancing at Yumi meaningfully. "Not a prince, and not true love—but an important kiss nonetheless."

Then Sei said nothing more. Not because there was nothing else to say, but because Yumi had pressed both hands to her mouth and shrieked for her to stop.

Even as she sat there, though, silencing her senpai and hearing Katou-san and Alice giggling at her embarrassment in the background, she couldn't help but feel a swell of gratitude growing inside of her chest.

What only one or two years ago would have been the worst thing imaginable—something absolutely devastating—had just happened to Yumi that day. Yet, she was surprisingly fine. Yes, she had cried initially, and, yes, she was still a bit depressed about it all, but she had recovered quickly and Sei hadn't allowed her even a minute to feel sorry for herself. Perhaps Yumi was a stronger person than she had initially given herself credit for.

Or perhaps that was simply the magic of Satou Sei.

* * *

Cars wooshed by, giving off a pleasant and repetitive sound that made Sei a bit sleepy. In truth, she had been in a daze almost all day, preoccupied with the two troublesome girls that she hadn't seemed to be able to escape from lately.

The silence in the car enhanced the mood. Neither Yumi nor Alice spoke to her, only whispering amongst themselves every once in awhile, and before long Yumi had settled in the back and taken to staring out the window. It was dark, but whenever they passed by a streetlight, Sei could glance in the rear-view mirror and see that Yumi was still wide awake. Sometimes their gazes would meet for a brief moment.

When they made it to the Arisugawa house, it was already a bit past the time when their tutoring sessions were meant to end.

"You can just tell your mother that we decided to do your lessons at the library," Sei suggested, as she parked a few meters away from the entrance to let Alice out inconspicuously.

"No, that's fine," Alice said. "Mother's not going to be home until later tonight, and Father works at the office until pretty late. I doubt they'll notice I was even gone."

Sei only nodded. Alice seemed to take that as her sign to go, fiddling with the passenger door handle a little too long, casting a few furtive glances at Sei.

Something else was on her mind, clearly, Sei thought. She didn't ask about it, though, and simply watched her as she struggled to say something.

"Th-thank you, Satou-san," Alice said finally. "Thank you for everything. It was actually really awkward being with Kashiwagi-san today. You really saved me." She looked behind her towards the back seat. "You, too, Yumi-san. Thank you both very much."

As she was getting out, Sei followed her with her eyes. She couldn't help but look at the girl: at the way her thin clothes clung to her form as the wind blew against her when she stepped out, at the way her short, messy curls bounced along the sides of her face.

Sei felt a finger poking her in the side, bursting her out of her thoughts—or, rather, lack of thoughts.

"If you're done checking out Alice, why don't you walk her to her front door and make sure she gets in fine?" It was Yumi, whispering from the back of the car.

 _What a silly thing to say,_ Sei thought. Of course Alice would get in just fine. It was her own house, wasn't it?

But obviously that's not what Yumi had meant. What she had meant was: _"If I were Alice, I would want you to walk me to my door."_

And so Sei, who usually didn't pick up on these kinds of things, had to rely on a normal girl like Yumi to point out the kinds of normal things that normal girls like Alice liked. She got out of the car as well and joined Alice on the small patch of sidewalk that led to the gate.

"Why were you with Kashiwagi, anyway?" Sei asked her.

Alice shrugged and only offered a sheepish look—aimed at the ground—while she punched in a code on the keypad under the gate's intercom. The gates gave a rusty sigh as they opened, just as Sei had remembered from the first time, and they both stepped through to the other side.

"To be honest," Alice finally admitted, as they trudged through the garden and towards the front door, "I had no one else to talk to about...things. You know which things. So I called him up." She looked a bit embarrassed. "It was a bad idea, though. He immediately acted like he was taking me out on a date, and it made me really uncomfortable, especially since I know he doesn't even like girls."

"He likes them a little bit," Sei said, and she looked back towards the direction of the car, towards Yumi, but she couldn't see her past the tall hedges of the garden. "You're right, though. He doesn't like them enough for _that_."

Alice sighed. "If I dress as a boy, I attract the wrong kinds of people, people who aren't interested in who I really am," she said, her voice wavering a bit. "Sometimes I even manage to attract girls, which is what I want, but they don't see the real me. I feel like I'm lying to them if I try to act like a boy. But if I dress like a girl, then they won't even notice me—unless, well, they're people like you...and Yumi-san." She said that last part quietly, as if she were unsure. Sei was a bit surprised that she had noticed Yumi's tastes so easily. Perhaps it was a sixth sense, the same as how Sei had felt herself when she first saw Kashiwagi.

"But even with you, look what happened," Alice continued. "You saw who I was on the inside, but then you were surprised by my body. It's like I can't win no matter what I do. I didn't mean to repulse you, but I guess it was inevitable."

Sei looked at her with some annoyance. "You didn't repulse me, Alice," she said. "It was just...a breakdown in communication. It's like when you overhear someone and think they're speaking Japanese for a split second, but soon enough you realize that they were actually speaking Spanish. It just surprises you, that's all. It throws you off for a moment." Sei smiled. "Especially if you thought you heard them say a rude word, like _mank—"_

"Either way, I'm sorry for bringing so much trouble to the two of you today," Alice gently interrupted. "If there's anything I can do to repay you, just let me know."

"Forget about it," Sei said casually, then began to turn to leave. After a second, though, she stopped. She looked at Alice. "Maybe there _is_ something."

"Something?"

"Something you can repay me with," Sei said. She knew that she was having yet another crazy thought, but she had been following through on those impulses lately, and even if they hadn't always worked out, they had led in interesting directions.

At any rate, she wanted to know. She just wanted to know _for sure._ And if it turned out that she had been wrong about Alice, then she could stop agonizing over it.

Alice smiled and took a short step towards Sei. "Like I said, I'll repay you with anything you want. How can I be of service?"

"You don't need to be of service," Sei said, waving her hand dismissively. She looked directly at Alice's face in the dim light of the garden lanterns. "But you can repay me with a kiss."

"Huh?" Alice seemed taken aback, as she often did. This time she seemed at a loss for words as well.

"On the mouth," Sei elaborated, as if Alice hadn't figured it out already—though she probably had.

"Um…," Alice stuttered. At first it seemed to Sei that she was struggling to find a way to ask Sei why she would make such a request, to satisfy her confusion. But after a moment, the expression on her face settled, and she looked into Sei's eyes with a matching intensity. "All right," she said.

Sei took Alice's chin in her hand and tipped her face up towards her. She bent down, even as she felt Alice stretching up to meet her.

Lightly, their lips met. It was a chaste kiss, the kind that Sei imagined people had all the time in the deserted corners of the darker stairwells at Lillian Academy; the kind that she had snuck herself with a few underclassmen here and there.

It was nothing like their first kiss had been. No desperate sighs, no deep explorations. However, when she pulled back, her lips were a little more moist than they had been before. She could still feel the kiss even after they had separated, even as they stood there and stared at each other. It felt like the lingering tingle of electrical static, and somehow it made her heart pound hard in her chest.

She noticed then that Alice was also breathing heavily.

 _Well damn,_ Sei thought to herself.

It would be stupid to pretend that she wasn't attracted to her now. Yes, she had hoped that she was wrong. It was a risk to feel this way, no doubt. Not only because of Sei's past, but because of Alice's present and future. It was just so plainly, obviously _inconvenient_ to feel this way.

And yet there it was.

"All right," Sei said to Alice after she had composed herself a bit. "Guess I'll see you later, then. Thanks for the kiss."

Alice, not quite back to her normal self yet, smiled bashfully. "Is this how you get all the girls to repay you when they owe you a favor?" she asked.

Sei reached over and tousled her hair. "Only the cute ones," she said.

She started to walk down the path back to the entrance, and nearly tripped over a few rocks as she glanced back at Alice. Alice didn't seem to notice, though, and merely waved to Sei shyly as she passed through the still open gates.

When Sei reached the car, Yumi was nowhere in sight. She peered through the window at the passenger seat and the backseat just to be sure, then she set off along the sidewalk, sweeping her gaze left and right along the path.

"Yumi-chan?" she called, a bit of panic coming over her. "Yumi-chan, where did you go?"

Soon enough, though, she found her not far from the Arisugawa home, on the other side of the block. She was leaning against the outer wall of the barrier to the house, looking up towards the stars.

"Yumi-chan," Sei said, still breathless—from the slight bit of worry or from the kiss, she wasn't sure. "What are you doing out here?"

Yumi seemed a bit out of breath, too. A tinge of pink was coloring her cheeks, but Sei wasn't totally sure what it meant.

She decided to assume anyway: "I see. So you were watching us," she said.

Yumi nodded, and Sei was a bit surprised at how freely she admitted it. "Then I saw you coming, though, and I thought if I tried to quickly get back into the car, then you'd definitely catch me. So I ran around the corner and tried to play it off like I was just taking a short walk."

Sei burst out in fits of laughter. "You're not really 'playing it off' if you say all of that, Yumi-chan."

"That's why I said I _tried_ to play it off. Obviously it didn't work."

After they both had a chuckle and started walking back towards the car, Sei threw an arm around Yumi's shoulders. "You seem to like spying on me when I'm canoodling with other girls, hm? I remember that time I was with Kanina Shizuka when you hid in the bushes. Are you that jealous?"

Yumi huffed. "You wish. Shizuka-sama and Alice-kun can fight over you all they want."

"Ah, Yumi-chan, it's like an arrow to my heart every time I hear you say such things," Sei said in mock hurt. "Why can't you be jealous for once?"

And then, Yumi stopped abruptly and turned to face her. Thrown off balance from the sudden shift in weight, Sei skidded to a halt, looking at her curiously.

"Because," Yumi said after a moment, "I already have you, Sei-sama."

Sei raised her eyebrows, and she pulled her head back in surprise. She was a little shocked at Yumi's frankness. She had never said something quite like that before, even if it was true.

 _Yes, it's true_ , Sei said to herself. She hadn't really given it much thought until that moment; her connection with Yumi was often an unspoken thing these days.

But yes, indeed, it was true. Yumi already had Sei. They already had a deep bond that could not be severed by outside forces—even by other women—so what more could she possibly want? A typical relationship? Even if Yumi by some chance wanted that with her, they both knew that Sei was the aloof type. What's more, not only was she absolutely not monogamous, but she wasn't at all discreet about her philandering, either.

 _God, I'd make a terrible girlfriend,_ Sei thought. _At least in the typical sense of the word._

But Sei wasn't a typical kind of person, either, and if anything Yumi seemed to appreciate that. For a moment, Sei couldn't help but feel extremely lucky, extremely grateful that she had met this short little spaz in high school.

She took Yumi's face between two palms and grinned at her. "You have me, Yumi-chan," she said, allowing herself a rare moment of sincerity for once.

Yumi closed her eyes and pressed her cheek to Sei's left hand, wrapping her arms around her waist. They were so absorbed in their two-person bubble that they didn't even notice the woman in the overcoat who was coming down the street until she roughly brushed past them. She had come so close that they were both thrown off and had to step aside to accommodate her.

Sei recognized the woman, and opened her mouth to say something, but by then the lady had disappeared quickly around the corner. She had seemed to speed up as soon as she came upon them.

"Who was that?" Yumi whispered, following Sei's gaze, apparently noticing the recognition.

Sei let out an amused breath through her nose. " _That_ was Alice's mother."

* * *

 _A/N:_

 _Hello again!_

 _Thanks for reading, and all of your lovely reviews. Indeed, I was going for "something" when I wrote this, haha. Once the weird idea popped into my mind, I couldn't resist. Glad it's managed to pique some people's interest!_

 _I think at this point it would be good to make a quick note: This chapter (and the one before it) makes some mild references to scenes in the_ Maria-sama ga Miteru _novels that were trimmed a bit from the anime. Mainly, it was Sei's more open discussion with Yumi about Kashiwagi's sexuality (and her own), as well as Yumi's inner monologue during her kiss with Sei in the classroom._

 _If you have the time, I totally recommend reading some of the novels; they're hilarious and shed a lot of light on the characters. Sei is also even more of a cheeky bastard than she is in the anime!_

 _Anyway, new chapter coming...soon or something. Gotta get some work done first. :P_


	5. Chapter 5: In Wonderland

**Chapter 5: In Wonderland**

When the car came to a stop, Yumi braced herself for that final jerking motion, but it didn't come. In fact, the whole movement had been uncharacteristically smooth, with Sei giving the brakes a light tap and the car rolling hesitantly along the curb outside Yumi's house.

Sei looked out the window, and Yumi could see the sharp features of her profile reflected against the glass. "So we're here," Sei said. Her voice was casual, flat even—but there was something else underneath. Yumi had barely caught it; the inflection on the last word seemed unpunctuated, like she had left some empty space for other words to follow.

When she said nothing more, Yumi reached for the handle of the car door. "I'll see you later, Sei-sama," she said, but she paused just after she had opened it. She looked up at the shape of her house in the darkness, and she noticed that none of the windows seemed lit.

 _They're probably asleep,_ she thought.

She wondered if Sei was thinking the same thing she was.

"Sei-sama," Yumi whispered. She wasn't sure why she felt so hesitant; it wasn't like she was going to ask for anything unusual. "Would you like to come up for awhile?"

Even with the sudden blush that she could distinctly feel spreading over her face, she mustered up the courage to turn and look at Sei. In return, Sei was staring intensely at her with an expression that she couldn't read.

"No," Sei replied after a moment. "I don't think that's a good idea, Yumi-chan." She turned her attention back towards the road and brought her hand to the stick shift. As soon as Yumi stepped out, the car started to peel away, and Sei offered only half a smile and a brief wave goodbye before she disappeared around the corner.

Yumi stood alone on the curb, a cool wind billowing through the empty street. _She's right,_ Yumi thought. It wasn't a good idea to be alone with Sei. Not tonight, not after the incident with Sachiko, not while the pain was still so fresh.

If Sei had come up to her room, something would have obviously happened between them. Yumi wasn't exactly sure what that would have been, but she wasn't so naive that she couldn't take a fairly educated guess. If they had done something, though, it would have been too early to tell if it was fueled perhaps a bit too heavily by Yumi's need for comfort, and Sei seemed to know this. Maybe this was why she had been leading her around to all of those public places, hardly allowing them a minute alone the whole night.

It was then that she realized what Sei's blank face had meant. Sei had clearly been tempted to indulge her in the end, especially after such an open invitation. She had been resisting the temptation, setting her mind into escape mode before she could accidentally say yes. It was that generous side of Sei again, the side that wanted to spare her pain, even if it meant forgoing touch. Yumi smiled to herself in the dark, then turned and walked towards her front door.

When she stepped through the threshold and started taking off her shoes, she was startled by a voice that burst out of the darkness.

"Yumi?"

She let out a yelp, dropping her outdoor shoes just short of the shoe rack and stumbling clumsily into the wall.

"Shhhh!" the voice hissed at her. "You're making a huge racket. Do you want to wake up Mom and Dad?"

Yumi looked up and saw the unmistakable face of her younger brother. She could just make out his features in the dim light. "Yuuki? What are you trying to do lurking in the dark like that, scare me half to death?"

"No, I was having trouble falling asleep and then I heard a car outside, so I came to see what was going on. What are you doing home so late? It's almost midnight," he said.

"I was out with...a friend." It was the truth, but for some reason Yumi felt like she was telling a lie. Maybe it was because the whole story could not possibly be encompassed by such a mundane sentence. After they had dropped Alice off, Sei had taken her on an unplanned date in the shopping district. At first it had seemed random to her, but as they walked to and fro—visiting arcades and karaoke places—it occurred to her that Sei was simply trying to tire her out.

It had worked. She had lost complete track of time, and was ready to plop into bed without a second thought about Sachiko or anything else that had occurred that day.

Yuuki took a step towards her. "Was that Satou Sei-san out there with you? It looked like her in the car." His tone was strange, like he actually cared what her answer was going to be.

Yumi gave him a weird look. "Yes, that was her. I was out with her. So what?" She wasn't trying to snap at him, but now that she was inside and the sleepiness had hit her all at once, she wasn't in the mood to be interrogated.

"Oh," he said. That single syllable hung in the air a bit longer than necessary, and Yumi couldn't help but wonder what his problem was.

Before long, though, he turned to leave, shuffling over towards the stairs. Then he stopped.

"Say, Yumi," he began. "Are you...I mean, is Satou-san…?"

Yumi stared at him in bewilderment. It simply wasn't like him to notice that sort of thing. Had he overheard their conversation outside? Even if he had, it seemed unlikely he could have understood such a short exchange out of context like that—unless the meaning of her awkwardness was universally readable.

She turned her attention back to her shoes and started to fumble them onto the rack. "No," she said, not looking at him. "Not really. Well, kind of." She steadied her shoes and looked back over at him. "No. No, we're not." She decided that this was the right answer for now. "Why do you ask?"

"Ah, no reason." He studied Yumi's face, and must have noticed that this answer was rather unsatisfactory, because after a moment he sighed and continued: "I was at the game center today. I was supposed to meet a friend there, but I saw Kashiwagi-san and Alice hanging around. The vibe was really weird, and I didn't want to get in the middle of it, so I avoided them. While I was getting ready to leave, I spotted you and Satou-san walking up and down the aisles holding hands. Well, I guess it was more like she was dragging you around by the hand and you were letting her."

"Yeah?" Yumi said, reaching for her house slippers. "So?" It wasn't weird for girls to hold hands, after all. She did it all the time with Sachiko.

"Nothing. It was...the way you were looking at her. It kind of surprised me. I just thought…." Again, he appeared to study Yumi for a few seconds. "Look, never mind. Forget I said anything." He turned again and started heading back up the stairs.

Yumi shuffled after him, keeping a certain distance, watching her feet with every step to keep from stumbling in the dark. When his footfalls came to an abrupt stop again, she looked up.

He was halfway up the stairs when he turned to her. "Yumi, even if the two of you _were_ _..._ together or something, it would be okay," he said. His eyes were wide with anxious energy. "It wouldn't bother me." His face seemed to say that he was trying to transfer some kind of information, but was totally unsure how to convey it delicately. Yumi thought with amusement that she wasn't the only one in the house who was completely readable. "Even if it wasn't her," he stuttered. "If it was, you know, some other woman, who wasn't her, I wouldn't care. I mean, I would care, but I'd only care if she was good to you. I mean, I wouldn't feel any differently about you if you were…."

He stopped there.

Yumi blinked. It was so quiet in the house that she could hear the growing moisture on her eyelids pop as she reopened her eyes.

"Yuuki…." A flood of emotion began to well up in her chest, something she had been avoiding since that morning, something she had never been very good at repressing. She looked down at her feet again and felt two or three heavy tears fall like raindrops onto the floor. "Yuuki," she said, "I...think that we'll never actually get any sleep if you keep stopping before we get to our rooms." A throaty laugh escaped her mouth, but it racked her body in a shudder, like a sob.

"Mm, yeah," he said in his typically non-committal way. Yuuki looked a little scared at first, but he seemed to calm down when she glanced up at him with a grateful smile.

"Thank you," she whispered.

When they were finally all the way up the stairs, and she had shut herself in her bedroom, she pressed her hands to her face and leaned against the door. This time, she couldn't stop herself. The few rays that were floating into the room from the streetlights outside became blurred smears, a mosaic of light. Her eyes grew hot, then the hands that were pressed to her eyes, then her wrists and the rest of her face.

" _Thank you,"_ she said again, this time to the empty room, as her tears flowed in many paths down her neck. _Thank God that people like Yuuki and Satou Sei exist in the world._

But that wasn't enough. She didn't want to thank God only for the people who propped her up. She wanted to thank Him for the pain that was pulsing in her chest, the pain of that small thorn that Sachiko had planted nearly four years before that had grown into a splintery vine. It was a pain that she could feel bleeding out of her—trickle by trickle—and transmuting into love.

* * *

Alice opened her eyes. She could see half of her face reflected in the shining metal of her mother's favorite flower pot. It looked distorted, her features stretched queerly along the bulbous surface.

The truth was, though, that it was not unlike what she saw when she stared long enough in the bathroom mirror. She could always look at herself and pick out small imperfections—or even see a totally different person, depending on where she focused.

 _My nose is like a girl's,_ she would think to herself, or _My eyebrows are like a boy's._ Sometimes she'd lose track of time turning her face back and forth against the mirror's gaze, trying not to see the young man that everyone around her seemed to be wishing into existence. After awhile, her face would look distorted, like it wasn't even her face anymore, like it belonged to somebody else.

"Kintarou?" Her mother said, breaking her from her stream of thoughts. She looked over at the couch across from her, where her mother was sitting with a book draped over her knee. "Is that tutor of yours coming? Today's Monday, right?"

"Yes, Mother," Alice said.

Her Mother sighed and looked back down at her book. "I'll have to have a talk with your father about that girl. I know he just loves her, but I have a bad feeling about this whole thing," she said. "Maybe she's not an appropriate match for you as a tutor after all."

Alice perked up, trying to read her expression. "How do you mean, Mother?"

The older woman shot her an irritated glance, then finally took the book between two hands and clapped it shut. "The other night, I saw her in the middle of the street." She paused for a beat, as if the next part was too vulgar to say without a show of hesitation. "...with another young woman."

Deep inside, Alice wanted to laugh out loud. She was well-practiced at suppressing such instincts, though. Instead, she merely stared at her mother, giving her half a shrug. "What's wrong with that? Satou-san has many friends."

"Are you going to make me state it plainly, Kintarou?" she said, the irritation growing. "She was in the midst of...an embrace—an unseemly embrace—with another young woman, right out in the open, in the middle of the street. I don't care what people do in private, but I don't know if that's the kind of person I want teaching you."

"She's not teaching me to display affection in public, Mother," Alice dared to say, though she averted her eyes a little. "She's teaching me English. Nothing more."

Of course, the irony was not lost on her that Satou Sei had actually given her a very hands-on lesson regarding that exact topic on the night they had met. She had to fight the heat that was growing on her cheeks even from just remembering it.

Her mother sighed again. "I only want what's best for you, Kin-kun. Don't you want to live a normal life? Don't you want to build the kind of future you can be proud of?"

"What does this have to do with Satou-san?" she asked.

"If you want to...overcome the things that hold you back from success, Kintarou, you have to surround yourself with the right people. You can't surround yourself with those who will enable poor behavior, no matter how comfortable you may feel around those people. It's for your own good. One day, you'll thank me for this advice."

Alice looked at her blankly, silently. Every time her mother mentioned it, even in this vague way that danced around the subject, it stung to know that her parents disapproved of who she was. Worse still, they understood her so poorly that they seemed to think that people like Satou-san had something to do with why she'd rather wear dresses instead of pants.

 _It's just clothes!_ she wanted to scream. No matter what she wore, it hardly changed the person she actually was inside, something that was completely unavoidable.

But she knew what the real problem was. It wasn't the clothes—it was what the clothes _meant_. They wanted her to grow up, wear a suit, and marry a nice girl. Ironically enough, she didn't have much of a problem with most of that in and of itself; it was more about the cage that all of those features came with. It was about how they wanted her to use those things to lie about herself to other people.

Once, when her mother had implied one too many times that she was afraid "Kintarou" wouldn't be giving her any grandchildren, Alice had snapped and shouted that she wasn't a homosexual.

But that was a lie, too. She was a girl who liked other girls, which obviously put her in the same category as people like Satou-san. It almost made her break out into fits of sardonic laughter whenever she thought about how her mother was trying to unknowingly push her into a future same-sex marriage.

Unbidden, an image of Satou-san wearing a formal suit flashed into her mind. _It fits her better than me,_ she thought. She wondered idly if Satou-san was the type of woman who would wear a dress or a tuxedo to her own wedding. _Maybe she'd wear a pair of jeans,_ Alice mused. _Regardless, she'd spend most of the reception groping the bridesmaids._

Alice decided finally that Satou-san was probably the type of woman who would never get married in the first place. _Even if she'd make an attractive groom._ Alice rubbed her face and sighed. It was best not to think along those lines. She was no doubt smitten with Satou-san, but besides the older girl's occasional teasing, it was obvious that Satou had rejected her.

Then again, there had been that kiss—that kiss that Satou had asked for out of nowhere.

"Kintarou-kun?" The voice of her mother snapped her out of her thoughts once again. Even in the refuge of her mind, where she retreated often, there were constant intruders. "Is there something wrong?"

It was then that Alice realized that her face was hot. She had been sitting there, staring at the floor and blushing. No wonder her mother was suspicious. "Uh...it's nothing," she replied.

When the buzzer rang, Alice nearly jumped out of her seat.

"Calm down, it's just someone at the gate, dear," her mother said, giving her a strange look. She turned and glanced towards the entrance of the house. "That's probably your tutor, isn't it? Why don't you go get it?"

Alice couldn't help but tilt her head up and look at the moonlight that streamed through the broad windows as she walked towards the front door. It was a full moon, but the light had an oddly orange tint, like it had been colored with a touch of fire—perhaps because the last bits of sun were still disappearing over the horizon. She swiped her hand against the gate controls before slipping outside through the half-open door.

The path spread out before her. She watched as the gates cracked open and seemed to let the rest of the world inside. She took a deep breath, her eyes naturally falling towards the silhouette that stood motionlessly near the entrance. Had she not recognized the young woman immediately, she might have assumed that she was a statue.

Alice's feet felt unusually light as she stepped across the garden. It was like she was on a treadmill that was moving in reverse, pushing her forward, closer to that wicked grin that she could see in the distance. _Satou-san is like a cat,_ Alice thought, _like the sly, meandering spirit of a back-alley cat._

When Alice had reached her, she noticed that Satou-san had stayed behind one of the open gates and hadn't made a move to come inside. They stared at each other, the metal bars between them blocking those final steps that would bring them together.

"Good evening," Alice said, with the tone of a good student. She gripped the cold iron of the gate unconsciously. Then she added, "What are you doing over there?"

Satou's smile hadn't faded. "Good evening," she replied in kind. She reached out and touched Alice's fingers with her own. "I've come to bust you out of here."

* * *

Alice had never run up to her room, then back down the stairs, so quickly before. Her school bag, still filled with textbooks on several irrelevant subjects, thunked loudly with each step she took as she dragged it along on her descent.

"Kin—Kintarou? Kintarou!" her mother called out to her. "What on Earth has gotten into you? Where is your tutor?"

She didn't know how to answer at first. The truth was, she wasn't quite sure what had gotten into her, either. The moment Satou-san had flashed that crazy smirk at her, she had been overwhelmed with a sense of urgency, with a sense that she needed to assert her freedom somehow—right now, in this exact moment.

Maybe she felt that if she didn't run off fast enough, something in the house would try to slow her down.

"Kintarou!" Her mother had stood up now, and was walking over to meet her near the front door. "Where are you going?"

"To the library!" she lied, much too easily for her own comfort. Well, she wasn't sure if it was a lie or not; she just had a hunch that Satou-san was taking her to no such place. "We're going to study at the university library. There are some books that my tutor wants to show me that I don't have at home."

Her mother stared at her for a moment, even as Alice was urgently unlatching the door. "All right, then," she said. "But bring back a list of those books when you come home tonight. We can easily buy them for you."

Alice glanced briefly over her shoulder. Was her mother calling her bluff? She supposed that it hardly mattered. It was all out in the open now. Alice had already shown too much enthusiasm, and it was clear that she liked Satou-san, which meant that her mother would probably double her efforts to find an excuse to let her tutor go.

When Alice sprinted past the gates, she almost kept going straight into the road through sheer inertia. She skidded to a halt when she noticed Satou-san standing at the edge of the sidewalk, and then she remembered that she wasn't just running away from something—she also had somewhere to go.

Satou-san grabbed her by the sleeve of her shirt and tugged her away from the open gates. She had a momentary sensation of deja vu as she remembered that night at the bar, and she could almost feel the skin of Satou-san's warm palm against her fingers again. Even with their relative physical distance now—the older girl was not touching her directly—she could still smell Satou-san's unique scent, and it made her chest tighten for some reason.

"We're taking the bus today," Satou-san explained, rounding the corner and pulling Alice along with her. The street was empty and her voice projected carelessly in a light echo.

"Where are we going?" Alice finally thought to ask, though in truth she didn't care. She would go anywhere with Satou. The woman could lead her into a thrashing ocean in the middle of a typhoon and she would probably follow.

The smirk returned to Satou-san's face—or maybe it had never left in the first place. "We're going to Lillian, of course," she said.

They made it to the bus stop just in time, mere seconds after the monster hissed into the darkness and knelt down to accept passengers. They scanned their passes, slipping down the aisle to a random pair of empty seats in the relatively deserted bus.

At first, Alice trained her eyes on the window and watched the outside world flash by. Once she had mustered up the courage, though, she turned to look at Satou-san. The older woman was not looking at her, but the expression on her face surprised Alice. It was a dreamy, contented look. It was the look of a person being carried along without a care in the world, the look of a person who could have ridden the bus forever without an ounce of impatience.

Then it occurred to Alice that she felt the same way. She didn't want to go anywhere just then. She didn't want to _be_ anything, either. She didn't care if she was Alice or if she was Kintarou. For some strange reason, on that ordinary bus that seemed to have been pulsing with some mysterious energy, both of those identities disappeared like mirages.

 _Keep moving, keep moving._ She urged the rumbling engine to never stop. She could have sat next to Satou Sei for the rest of her life.

The bus spat them out just down the street from the Lillian campus. Hopping down the last step and onto the sidewalk was more of a jarring experience than Alice had expected, and the air outside seemed unusually empty and dry. She didn't mind it so much, though.

Alice started to walk towards the shadows of the Lillian University buildings, but a hand on her shoulder brought her to an abrupt stop. Satou-san gripped her waist and turned her forcefully in a slightly different direction. She shuddered against her senpai's touch.

"Not there," Satou-san whispered in her ear. " _Here._ "

Alice looked up to see where Satou-san had pointed her, and finally noticed the looming gates that rose high above them. "The high school section?" she asked curiously.

She didn't ask why they were there, though. She had a strange feeling that it would reveal itself soon enough, so she merely followed closely behind Satou-san as they walked through those famous gates and wandered down a path lined with trees. She noticed that the branches on most of the plants were starting to fill back up with leaves, the rebirth of early spring nearly at its peak.

Once they had trudged along for awhile, through impressive gardens and past ancient fountains, Alice couldn't help but wonder if they had a destination at all. She hadn't cared about that—and she didn't really care now—but the idea that someone would see her there and notice that she didn't belong started to creep into her mind. It made her want to hide, to not saunter as freely and gaily as her companion did.

"Uh...Satou-san," she began to say, unable to suppress the uncertainty in her voice.

Satou-san stopped in the middle of the path right next to a vine of white roses. Her hands were stuffed into her pockets—in insolent contrast to the elegance of the surroundings—and she wore a silly grin on her face. "Now, now, don't call me that, Alice," she said. "Here in the garden of maidens, you are to refer to me as Sei-sama."

Alice stared at her, her eyes widening against her will. Satou's voice had sounded so serious that Alice had to look closely at her face again to surmise that she was joking. "Uh...ah...Satou-san," she tried again.

" _Sei-sama,_ " Satou-san corrected. "Call me _Sei-sama._ " The grin had grown lop-sided, a show of twisted intent.

So she _was_ mocking her own school tradition, Alice thought, and yet it seemed that she wanted Alice to play along just the same.

Alice sighed, averting her eyes from Satou-san's gaze. "Um... _Sei-sama_ ," she mumbled. She immediately blushed so furiously that her ears were burning like a pair of short-circuited batteries.

Sei-sama looked like she was about to laugh, but she didn't. Instead, she merely nodded slowly, in mock approval, then lay a hand on the top of Alice's head. "Good. Very good, Alice-chan," she said.

Somehow, Alice's blush deepened. She felt it spreading to her neck, and Sei-sama appeared suddenly alarmed.

"Uh, Alice, are you okay?" she asked, in her normal tone, abruptly breaking character.

Alice merely nodded. She was no stranger to putting on a show or playing a role, of course, but she had never tried to do it for fun before. With the exception of school plays, all her roles had been so serious to her, it was like her life depended on how well she wore the mask.

Still, she understood what Satou Sei-sama was trying to do.

"Sei-sama," she managed to say finally without stuttering, though her cheeks still felt like they were about to burst into flames. "Where are we going? What if we run into some of the high school students and they wonder who I am?"

"Relaaax," her senpai murmured. She made a fist and knocked it lightly against the side of Alice's head. "You look like a normal girl, even in those clothes. You even look young enough to pass as a high schooler. Besides, you're with me, right? If anybody sees you with me, they'll just giggle and run away without asking anything."

Alice gave her a curious look. "Is that so?"

"Of course," Sei-sama replied. She turned around and started to walk up the path once again. "They'll assume that we're on a date." She looked over her shoulder briefly, and upon seeing Alice's face she let out a rather unladylike laugh. "Good Lord, you embarrass quite easily, don't you? It's a good thing I didn't go with the first idea I had earlier, or your head might have exploded."

"What was that?" Alice dared to ask.

Sei-sama didn't look at her as she trudged forward, but even staring at the back of her head, Alice could somehow tell that she was still smiling to herself. "I was going to try to get you to call me _Onee-sama_ ," she said.

Alice felt the blood drain from her face.

They didn't stop walking until they reached a thicket of trees. In the dim evening light, Alice could see the top of a Western-style roof rising over the canopy as they approached, with a prominent cross hovering at the apex. It took Alice a moment to recognize that they were standing in front of a chapel.

 _This is a Catholic school after all,_ she thought. She couldn't help but find it a bit ironic that Sei-sama had been a student here, of all places. Nearly everything about her, besides perhaps her Western appearance, seemed decidedly unchristian. For a moment, she tried to imagine Sei-sama kneeling at a pew, praying the rosary or doing something equally Godly.

She just couldn't string those images together in her mind, though.

"Say," Alice said, gesturing towards the charming little building with the colorful windows, "isn't this where Catholic people go to tell a priest all of their secrets or something?" As soon as she said it, though, she couldn't help but wonder if she was coming off as totally ignorant and disrespectful. Having gone to a Buddhist school, she knew next to nothing about Christianity.

Thankfully, Sei-sama laughed. "You mean confession?" she asked. "I imagine that might be the case in some schools. For us, we use the chapel to have mass sometimes and to perform the entrance ceremony for new students. Other than that, hardly anyone is ever in this chapel. Confession happens at a different temple on the grounds."

"Did you have to…?"

"Every Saturday," she said. "Well, every Saturday until I learned how to excuse myself gracefully. I used to lie during confession, anyway, so I doubt it did me any good in the eyes of God or Maria-sama."

"Why would…," Alice began, but then stopped. She glanced at her companion awkwardly, wondering if she had perhaps led the conversation in too personal of a direction.

"Say it," Sei-sama told her. "Go ahead and ask it."

"Why would you lie?" Alice said. "Did you really do such terrible things that you needed to hide them?"

"No, actually," she said, sounding a bit nostalgic. "It was the opposite. I would lie and make up things that I _didn't_ do. It made the confession more entertaining. The only thing I hid from others was…."

Sei-sama was quiet for awhile. After a moment, though, she pointed towards the front doors of the chapel. She was smiling vaguely, but her expression seemed a bit pained, almost like she was wincing at some long-forgotten memory that erupted inside of her mind just then.

" _There_ ," she said. She dropped her pointing hand and shoved it back in her pocket, gesturing instead with her chin. "Right in there. That's where I first kissed a girl."

Alice stared at her, completely bewildered. Had she taken her all the way out here to show her _this_? As much as she was honored, it all seemed so personal. So unlike the usual lighthearted Satou-san.

"Did she kiss you back?" Alice asked, before she could stop herself.

Sei-sama shook her head and looked away, at something far off that Alice couldn't see. "She slapped me in the face, actually. She pushed me away." The abrupt seriousness of her expression made Alice think that it couldn't have been a simple matter of someone rejecting her casual flirting. There was pain in the way the older woman's jaw tightened, in the way she stared hard into the distance, and then at the ancient wooden doors of the chapel.

Alice stood there and wordlessly studied her face.

 _Sei-sama had been in love._ She found that she understood at least this much. Sei-sama's first love had been a heartbreak.

It was hard to imagine that now, with her provocative attitude and the way other girls openly admired her. Even her friend Katou-san, who on the surface seemed to merely tolerate her, was obviously taken with Sei-sama at least to some degree. It was hard to picture this woman rejected, heartbroken—and yet, for a moment, that's what Alice saw as she looked at her in the moonlight. The vulnerability made Alice want to look away, like she was gazing through the un-curtained window of a house and observing someone's most private moments.

Then again, wasn't it Sei-sama who had opened the curtains, even if unintentionally?

"Satou-san," Alice whispered. She took a step towards the older woman, and for the first time that night, she reached out to her. She pressed a comforting hand to her forearm. It was warm, even through the layers of her jacket.

Sei-sama's head snapped immediately towards her. Her eyes flicked in recognition, as if she were only just seeing Alice, as if she were awakening from a dream. "I told you before," she whispered back, a familiar smirk spreading on her face, "call me Sei."

But that wasn't what Sei had told her earlier at all.

Alice turned back to the chapel and for the first time noticed a flickering light that illuminated the windows from the inside. It cast interesting designs against the stained glass, but she couldn't see any objects through the opacity.

"There's a light," she said softly.

"Yes," Sei replied. Her tone sounded as if she already knew, as if she had been avoiding the subject. She was gazing at the chapel as well, a strange expression on her face. "There's somebody inside right now."

Alice followed the dancing rays of light with her eyes for a few seconds, a bit mesmerized, then turned towards Sei. "Should we leave?" she asked, a sense of urgency coming over her for some reason. She still couldn't shake the feeling that they shouldn't be there.

Sei didn't answer. Instead she appeared to stare down the small path that led to the doors. She seemed to be contemplating something.

Then she took Alice's hand. Together, they walked to the front of the chapel. Though Alice knew that it was Sei who was tugging her along, for a brief moment it almost felt as if she were the one who was leading Sei, slowly helping to inch her towards the entrance.

It was Sei who boldly pushed the doors open, though. It was she who pulled Alice in from the cool outside air and into the musty little building that smelled like centuries-old wood. Their footsteps echoed as they walked down the central aisle, filling the emptiness with what felt like vulgar noise, and it suddenly made Alice remember that she was wearing her outside shoes. _Should we have taken them off?_ _It's like a temple, isn't it?_ she thought.

Then her train of thought ended abruptly. There was a girl near the altar of the chapel.

She was sitting in the first row of pews in front of an array of lit candles, her silky long hair flowing like a black fountain over her shoulders. The girl heard them almost immediately; her locks whipped around as she turned to see who had stumbled into the room.

Sei skidded to a halt, which made Alice nearly run into her. Pressing her face to Sei's shoulder—to hide herself, perhaps, like a bashful child—she peered down the aisle at the young woman whose prayers they had clearly interrupted. It took her a moment to recognize the girl's features in the candlelight. What's more, the girl seemed to be busy recognizing them as well.

Alice blinked a few times, to let her eyes adjust. There was no question now. It was the pale and helpless face of Ogasawara Sachiko-sama that stared back at them.

* * *

 _A/N:_

 _Hello again. As always, thank you for going on this silly journey with me into the life of Satou Sei and special thanks to Masane, MsgmSY, 30secondstoidealize, and sakuya112 for your kind reviews. More to come!_

 _Another minor note for those who have only seen the anime: Sei was of course referring to Kubo Shiori in this chapter. In the anime, Shiori merely pushes Sei away from her when Sei tries to steal a kiss in the chapel. In the novel and manga, though, she actually slaps her across the face and tells her that "Maria-sama is watching." Ahhh, young love._


	6. Chapter 6: Confession

**Chapter 6: Confession**

The narrow aisle of the sanctuary seemed to stretch and grow, spreading like the body of a snake that was slowly uncoiling. Sei could almost feel the floor moving underneath them, and Sachiko's startled face appeared to retreat further and further, even though she knew it was probably an optical illusion. This chapel always had a way of disorienting her.

She felt Alice trying to bury her face in the muscle of her shoulder, a pair of small hands gripping her by the wrist. _How bold of her,_ Sei thought. The girl by her side nervously huffed, and it resonated through the chapel, so for a moment she thought that Alice was crying, but when she turned to her right and looked at her face, she saw only a rush of panic in her eyes.

Sei inclined her head towards Alice. It was a much too intimate gesture, the same dipping movement that she used when she would lean in for a kiss. Alice's mouth even seemed to open slightly in expectation, but Sei stopped short with a bit of space between them. They ended up with their eyes locked, their noses nearly touching, their breaths mingling.

"It seems we've bumped into the Red Queen," Sei whispered, so that only the younger girl could hear.

Alice didn't even crack a smile. She only gave her a helpless look, one that Sei couldn't begin to interpret. _Does she know Sachiko personally? What's going on?_

Regardless, it made no difference when it came to the task at hand. The universe had thrown her a wild card that night, and she needed to spend her mental energy on taking care of that.

"Alice," she said. "You can go wait for me outside." It wasn't a request.

She had half-expected Alice to protest, but it appeared that when it came to being stuck between facing Sachiko or standing outside and possibly being discovered by students, loitering unsupervised on Lillian property had won. Alice immediately began pulling away, averting her gaze from Sachiko's general direction.

"Yes, Sei…-san," Alice whispered before she practically sprinted back towards the front doors of the chapel. _Ah,_ Sei thought, _so she's not quite bold enough for that._ True, though, that when Sei had dared Alice to address her by her given name only, she hadn't really expected the girl to do it. It was admirable that she had even tried, and Sei felt a little bad now that she had teased her—but only a little.

When the doors closed with a thud behind her, Sei met the questioning stare of Ogasawara Sachiko. The flames of a dozen candles seemed to be reflecting in her watery eyes, but Sei couldn't see a single tear on her face. _She's good at hiding it,_ Sei thought. _But I know that look and I know that place. I was there almost five years ago._

She padded down the walkway, looking right back at Sachiko with a neutral expression. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the monotonous rows of identical pews rolling past, and some part of her was struggling to remember which one she had napped in all those years ago. It made her feel a little depressed when she found that she couldn't remember.

Before long, the pews had ended. She stood motionlessly next to the only occupied row near the front of the altar. She was momentarily tempted to make the sign of the cross, but Sachiko's constant stare already looked a bit dangerous, and she didn't want to step on a land mine just yet.

"What the heck are you doing here, Sachiko?" she asked instead.

"With all due respect," Sachiko responded, after only a brief pause of what seemed like mildly offended surprise, "I could ask the same thing of Sei-sama."

Oh, so she was in a bad mood, too. Sei chuckled, which only earned her a stronger glare, and she plunked into the seat right next to Sachiko, draping her arms casually over the edge of the backrest.

"You can ask me," Sei said. "I don't mind. I'm on a date, if you really want to know." She wasn't sure why she had chosen this word to describe her and Alice's little get-together, but it seemed fitting enough. Yes, it probably _was_ a date, now that she thought about it.

"Is this really the type of place to be embracing your lover in the dark? Don't tell me you've been seeing someone from the high school division," Sachiko rambled. "Isn't Sei-sama a touch too old for that by now?"

So she hadn't recognized Alice, it seemed. Maybe it had been too dark where they had been standing, or maybe Sachiko didn't know her after all. Sei merely shrugged. "Who're you calling old?" she replied. "And no, she's not in high school. She's a first-year university student and she never went to Lillian."

Sachiko's expression softened slightly. "Oh," she said, then she leaned back in the pew and sighed. "It's funny. For a split second when you first walked in, I thought she looked a bit like—"

"You thought she was Yumi-chan?" Sei asked. "For a fraction of a millisecond, I had that same impression when I first met her, too."

Sachiko threw her another annoyed glance. "I was going to say that I thought she looked _a bit_ like her, yes." Her tight frown began to relax a little more, though, and she nearly smiled. "But I knew it wasn't her, of course. I could recognize Yumi even if she was wearing the most elaborate disguise in the world."

"You two always had such a sisterly connection. I have to admit that I'm a little jealous." Sei gazed out at the dancing flames in front of them, and noticed that two of the candles—standing side by side—were notably taller than the rest. "That sort of relationship isn't for me, but it's very beautiful."

From the edge of her perspective, she could see Sachiko clasping her hands roughly together and dropping them into her lap. "Maybe that sort of relationship isn't for me, either," she murmured.

Sei couldn't help but wonder if Sachiko had intended to say it out loud. Then again, much like her Onee-sama Youko, Sachiko rarely did things unintentionally.

"Are those your prayers over there?" Sei gestured towards the two freshest candles with a short nod.

Sachiko was silent at first. "That girl…," she said suddenly, her face tipping upwards as if she were making some kind of mental connection. She turned her head and looked at Sei. "That was Alice, wasn't it?"

Sei looked at her with a mixture of surprise and amusement. So she _did_ know her. Even more interestingly, she was familiar enough with her to call her by a nickname with no honorific, which was certainly rare coming from Sachiko. Maybe it was just that everybody was too embarrassed to call Alice by her chest-thumping given name.

"Arisugawa-san, I mean," Sachiko corrected herself a few seconds later, in a soft voice. She had the ghost of a smile on her face. "It took me a moment. It's not like she and I ever talked much or saw each other outside the school festival activities. I remember her face, though. Actually, I probably wouldn't have remembered at all if I hadn't seen her recently at the house. I think it was her who Suguru-san brought by, but I can't remember when. She's grown up a bit, but yes, that seems to have been Arisugawa-san. Was it?" She was directly questioning Sei with light curiosity.

Sei smirked. "Yes, it was."

"Well, I find that...rather surprising, to say the least. Indeed, it's very interesting. To see her here. With you."

There was a long moment when they both simply looked at each other, and the very, very obvious question lurked silently in the dark air around them. Sei wasn't sure if she needed to answer first, or if Sachiko wanted to be the one to ask.

"Sei-sama," Sachiko began slowly, "if that's the case, then I imagine that you know about her situation. She hasn't kept it from you, has she?"

The look of polite concern on Sachiko's face was the only thing keeping Sei from bursting into laughter. "Yes, don't worry, I definitely know," Sei said with amusement. "Though to be honest, it was kind of a shock when I first realized."

Sachiko actually giggled a little into a closed fist. "I can only imagine. With your tendency to be overly affectionate before you even get to know someone, things could get rather confusing, couldn't they? Ah, well I'm glad she told you, then."

"Actually, she didn't," Sei mumbled sheepishly, scratching the back of her head. "She didn't want to tell me at first. It just kind of became obvious after a certain point."

"Oh?" Sachiko looked at her blankly at first, but before long a slight tint came over her cheeks. " _Oh._ I see. Well, I hadn't thought about...that. That would be something of a problem for you, wouldn't it?"

"Mmm," Sei said thoughtfully. "I don't know yet. Sometimes I think that I'm only creating the problem in my mind. At the end of the day, she's made of atoms and molecules just like any other girl, right?"

"You've always had a strange way of speaking, Sei-sama." Sachiko was smiling, though, so Sei didn't take it as an insult. "And you never cease to surprise me, somehow, even after all of this time."

Sei finally turned all the way to look at her. She studied the elegant lines of Sachiko's face, the smooth pale skin, and the conspicuous darker patches just under her eyes.

Upon casual inspection, most people wouldn't have noticed anything different about Sachiko's demeanor. She wore her masks excellently when needed, even if Yumi had worked hard for years to make that sort of disguise less and less necessary. Sei could tell that Sachiko was distraught, though, that a good chunk of her usual energy had been drained out, that she probably hadn't been sleeping or eating. They may have never been the closest of friends—they were both hard to get close to in their own respective ways—but they had spent enough time together that an inevitable bond had grown between them. The Yamayurikai had that effect on people.

"I never gave this much thought while we were in high school, but even now I consider you like family, Sei-sama," Sachiko told her, seemingly out of nowhere. It appeared that they had been thinking along the same lines. "I know that I can't hide anything from you very well. Maybe it's because you're that exhausting kind of person who can always see someone's true self, even when they're trying to desperately hide it, or maybe it's because you've known me for so long."

"You had a falling out with Yumi-chan," Sei said to her. There was no inflection in her voice to suggest that it was a question.

"Is it that obvious? Am I that pathetic when she and I aren't speaking?"

 _Yes and yes,_ Sei wanted to say, but she didn't. She debated whether or not to mention that Yumi had already told her about the incident. _But maybe Yumi didn't really tell me,_ Sei thought. After all, the same situation could be colored in many vastly different ways, depending on who was viewing it. Maybe it had been completely different from Sachiko's perspective.

"I would understand it if you didn't want to tell me what happened," Sei finally said, "but if you need to talk about it, I'm here." It was the most that she could offer.

Sachiko inhaled deeply, and Sei realized that she was holding back a fresh wave of tears. A few breaths later, she appeared to have successfully suppressed them. "Actually, I think out of all the people I could have run into tonight, you may be the one who could understand the most," Sachiko said, turning her gaze to the floor in front of her. "Maybe it was divine intervention that you showed up here, even if you were the last person I would have wanted to see. When Maria-sama answers prayers, sometimes the delivery isn't what you expect."

Sei tilted her head in mild surprise. "Oh? Why do you say that?" Sure, there had always been playful animosity between them, but it was nothing serious, especially now that they were university students.

"Because of...whatever it is that is going on between you and Yumi," Sachiko replied. "I'm not blind, Sei-sama. I'm very much aware of it—and I don't like it. While I may have simply found it annoying before, I would be lying if I said that looking at your face right now wasn't testing my patience."

Sei gave her another surprised look. Slowly, though, she found herself nodding with understanding. "And now I show up with some other girl, and that makes it worse, doesn't it?"

Sachiko nodded in return. "Yumi loves you. It's very clear. It's a different kind of love from the kind I share with her, so I shouldn't be jealous."

"But you are," Sei said.

"Yes." The admission came out as little more than a whisper. "I'm her Onee-sama, and we will always be devoted to each other—or I would like to think that we will. But with you, she has no such bond. While this may create distance between you, it also creates freedom. With you, she's free to do what she likes and you have no expectations. You accept everything she does, and yet you're not particularly pleased with anything she does, either. This can be intoxicating for a girl like her who is used to always seeking approval," she said, her voice becoming increasingly ragged. "You are never one to give approval, just as you are never one to offer condemnation. It's like a loving indifference—that's the best way to describe it—you love her somehow without caring what she does at all. It's an unconditional love, an impersonal love, a love without standards or boundaries—and I can't stand it. It makes me sick to my stomach!"

Sei stared at her, completely stunned. Sachiko had balled her hands into a pair of tight fists and her eyes were screwed shut. Sei reach over and touched her arm, but Sachiko flinched away. She pressed her hands to her eyes and Sei could see small tears finally leaking out from the edges. It was like a dam that had finally broken.

"Don't you know what that does to a girl like her?" Sachiko cried. "Are you so unaware that you can't see it? Don't you know that you could very easily hurt her with that kind of love? It hurts because you give it away so freely! You give it away without question! You give it away to any girl who strikes your fancy in the middle of the street! How do you think it makes her feel to see you giving away what she should have earned from you? Isn't it unjust? Why does Sei-sama always—"

Then Sei grabbed her by the wrist and jerked her hand away from her face in one violent motion. " _Stop it_ ," Sei said.

Sachiko turned her head away immediately, so that Sei could not look at her. "I wish I could give her that," Sachiko whispered. "I wish I could give her exactly what you do, Sei-sama, but _I can't_. I'm not that kind of person. There will always be a part of her that cannot bare herself completely in my presence."

"This has nothing to do with the relationship between me and Yumi," Sei said gruffly. She leaned towards Sachiko, but did not try to touch her again.

Sachiko was quiet for a long moment. The brief convulsions that were her sobs were barely noticeable, but the wide open ceiling of the chapel seemed to pick up the faint echo nonetheless. "Have you slept with her?" Sachiko asked suddenly.

Again, Sei was shocked at Sachiko's audacity. She fought with herself to suppress the haze of anger that was beginning to grow in her chest and rise up to her face. "What difference does it make if I have?" she said, her voice sounding oddly detached as it reverberated back to her. She had thought of denying it, which would have been the truth, but she was suddenly not in the mood to cater to Sachiko's crazed ramblings. "Anyway, do you think I just run around sleeping with every girl I know? What do you take me for? I may be a little too flirtatious, I'll give you that, and I may be a bit indiscriminating and unprincipled like you suggest, but I actually haven't been with that many women before."

Sachiko's body heaved, but the sob didn't come. She still would not look at Sei. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "You're right. I really shouldn't have asked such a thing. It's none of my business." There was a pause. "Maybe I'm just projecting. Maybe it's my own guilt that I'm thrusting upon you unfairly, Sei-sama. I apologize."

Sei, who could never help but let things go almost instantly, felt her ire deflating. "Don't say that. There's nothing for you to feel guilty about, Sachiko."

"You don't understand," she said. Then, finally, she turned to face Sei, but her mouth was still partly covered by the tips of her fingers. A few locks of her messy hair had fallen over her eyes. "I…," she started to speak; her throat seemed to spasm momentarily and cut her off, and it took her a few seconds to try again. "I've done...things. Things that were wrong. With several people. Without Yumi knowing, without anyone knowing."

Sei looked at her in complete non-understanding. "Things?" she asked. "What are you talking about?" An idea slowly started to form in her mind, but she pushed it away. It was too ugly.

"I'm not what you think I am," she said, her eyes shifting again towards the rows of burning candles. "I'm not what anyone thinks I am. If you knew, then maybe even that silly, indiscriminating love of yours wouldn't be enough to keep you from looking upon me with judgment."

"Sachiko, what the hell are you talking about?" Sei repeated. An unpleasant sensation had begun to churn in her gut. It was a heavy feeling, yet paradoxically there was a sense of emptiness. She forced herself to put a hand on Sachiko's shoulder.

"Sei-sama, I've...been with other people, during times of loneliness. I know that it's no excuse, but during those times I felt that there was no one I could turn to, no one to feel close to in that way. I don't know why I craved it so much."

Sei was already shaking her head. "Look, Sachiko, I'm not really sure what you mean. I almost don't _want_ to know what you mean. But you're a human being and you're not in any way obligated towards Yumi to remain celibate. It's only natural that you might have an interest in dating people. You're nearly twenty years old, for God's sake."

It was Sachiko's turn to shake her head. "I haven't been dating anyone, Sei-sama. I _couldn't_ have dated these people. Moreover, I didn't want to."

Sei felt her whole body tighten. "I see," she said, very flatly. Again, she hoped that what she was thinking was wrong, totally off the mark.

Sachiko was quiet for a long while. She seemed to be struggling with what she would say next, the mild color on her otherwise pale cheeks giving away her embarrassment. Finally, she seemed to give in, and her body grew more slack. "It started with...the girl who was hired to work in our kitchen at home," she whispered, averting her eyes, refusing to even look in Sei's direction. Sei found that she was grateful for this, though, because she could only stare at Sachiko with a stupid look of pained shock.

"I was still in my third year of high school at the time," Sachiko continued. "She was young, too, barely older than I was, but a bit more knowledgeable about _certain things_. She was always respectful, but I saw the way she would look at me. I wasn't naive; I knew what that look meant. My mother thought it was a little strange that I seemed to get along with her so quickly. It was during a night when everyone else was out—a few months after we hired her—that I first invited her to my room." She covered her face with her hands. "I didn't want to tell anyone after it happened. I didn't know what to do, or even what to think about it. I don't even know if I can say I really liked her like that. The next day, for some reason, I could barely face Yumi. I felt like I had been transformed into a different person and that somehow everyone would be able to tell what I had done. But of course they couldn't. How could they?"

"Sachiko…." Sei murmured.

"We were together a few more times, and then she transferred to another city. She was a university student, you see, and she was working her way through school. I wondered sometimes if maybe I had unfairly pressured her without realizing. She could have been fired if she got on my bad side, after all, so did she just go along with it because I asked? Had I taken advantage of her?" Another sob escaped her throat. "The thought of that racked me with guilt, but everything else about it excited me—the sneaking around, the forbidden nature of what we were doing in the same house where my father lived. It was disgusting, but it almost felt like I was responding to him with what I was doing, like I was playing out some kind of ritual that exposed the true face of the kind of household I lived in."

"After that...there were others," Sachiko said, barely taking a breath. Now that the truth had come out, she seemed to be spilling every detail as if she couldn't control herself. It was like a runaway train. "There were maybe half a dozen people, over the past two years: a neighbor; a girl who always came to deliver food; some of the servants in my extended family's households; a girl from Lillian university who had transferred in without going to the high school, so she didn't know who I was. Basically, anyone who I felt comfortable with and who would be able to be discreet about it. It was addicting, in a way. For once in my life, I felt like I could do whatever I wanted, as long as I wasn't overt about it. I felt the kind of freedom that the men in my family must have felt, and to my disgust I found that I could suddenly relate to them."

Sei still had no idea what to say. She looked at Sachiko's slumped body with a bit of pity, a face that she knew the proud daughter of the Ogasawara family wouldn't have appreciated. She couldn't shake this feeling of complete bewilderment, though. It was not often that she was thrown for a loop, but this was the last thing she had ever expected from this girl. The bottom half of the iceberg that was Ogasawara Sachiko went much deeper than she could have imagined.

"Are you still…?" Sei mumbled, in a daze, not completely committed to the question, not sure at all how to approach this.

"No," Sachiko said immediately. "A few months ago, I stopped."

"Ah," Sei replied, grasping for something positive. "That's good, I suppose."

"It wasn't by choice. I got scared that someone would find out. I…." She dropped her hands from her face and turned away from Sei again. "I slept with one of my distant cousins, while I was staying at her summer home. A girl, a bit younger than me. I told her not to tell anyone. I told her that we would both have a hard time if anyone knew. Afterwards, I found it so ironic that it almost made me laugh, but instead I wanted to tear my own skin off so that I could become another person. It highlighted everything I had judged Surguru-san for—sneaking around with others, trying to keep up superficial appearances to hide the truth from family. Of course, the girl was overcome with anxiety after what we did. She confessed the deed to a servant, whom I had to threaten to keep it quiet. It had all just exploded beyond what I expected. I told myself that I would never do it again."

When Sachiko finally looked at Sei, Sei had to stop herself from physically recoiling. Sachiko's eyes had glazed over and she seemed to have aged ten years in the course of their conversation; the posture of her entire body looked so defeated and drained of energy, that Sei felt for a fraction of a second that she wasn't even staring at a living being.

For the first time since they had met, Sei thought that Ogasawara Sachiko looked extremely unattractive. Sachiko seemed to sense Sei's reaction and began to turn away again.

Sei reached out with both hands and grabbed her by the shoulders, forcing her to turn back. "Look at me," Sei said. "You're right: you _do_ look pathetic. That guilt is pathetic—and it helps no one. It undoes nothing."

"I can't help but miss that sense of freedom even now," Sachiko whispered, her face nakedly baring her frustrated desire. "I was always envious of people like you, of how you were able to completely be yourself without a care in the world, how you were able to dance through life without ever wondering if you had failed those around you. How _could_ you fail? You had no duties in the first place. Satou Sei-sama is always extra, always a bonus, always someone you're glad to see—but never someone you'd be angry with if she didn't show up. That's just your nature. For a moment, I think I got a taste of that freedom, of a life with no expectations."

"Idiot," Sei said, her voice erupting from somewhere deep in her throat. It boomed through the small chapel. "What you felt wasn't freedom. That's not real freedom. How can you be free if you're hiding? How can you be free if you're still confining yourself to what others expect of you, even if it's just an appearance? Don't you see that you're still playing their game? People don't care if you behave; they only care that you don't flaunt it when you misbehave. You've become your parents."

Under most circumstances, these were the sorts of comments that would have earned Sei a slap, she was sure, but Sachiko was too defeated to fight for her own ego's sake. Sachiko's mouth tightened and she started to hang her head, but Sei didn't let her. Sei jerked Sachiko's shoulders roughly until their gazes met again.

"I was sick of it," Sachiko said. "I was so sick of having these short-lived relationships that were so devoid of meaning. I felt empty. I thought...maybe I could feel that same freedom, but have it _mean_ something. I thought, maybe if Yumi…."

She trailed off again, but Sei understood nonetheless. So this was what it had come to. Sachiko, in a moment of desperation, had grasped for Yumi. She had decided that she wanted to be with someone who she actually loved, but had not a single notion of how to go about it. The only kinds of physical relationships she knew were obviously the kind that stayed hidden.

Sei knew people like Sachiko. She knew people who seemed to think that love was either pure and platonic, or else it was dirty and physical. It was the Madonna-Whore Complex at its finest, and the only reason Sei felt a sharp stab of empathetic pain just then was because she had been that way herself once. She briefly glanced at the Maria-sama statue that had been silently regarding them from the altar during their whole conversation.

"Sachiko," Sei whispered, her voice nonetheless stern. "You can't expect Yumi to cater to your cowardice and secrecy. If you wanted to be with her, you should have approached her openly."

Sachiko heaved a deep sigh. "I know that," she said. "But I wish I could have both those things. I wish I could satisfy the myriad of expectations that my family has of me, and still enjoy a life of my own. I wish I could have a devoted little sister, but also...something more."

"Sometimes those things are in conflict, Sachiko. Sometimes you can only have one or the other."

"I know that," she repeated. "I shouldn't have tried to force it. Now look at where I am. I pushed Yumi away, I made her feel…."

"If you would have approached her openly—if you would have approached her like a potential lover, not like a sister who is trying to make her into an accomplice in some forbidden romance—if you wouldn't have tried to make things so damned melodramatic," Sei told her, " _she would have reciprocated_."

Sachiko became very still when the words seemed to reach her. Her eyes grew unfocused. Her body became rigid with tension. There were no sobs, but fresh tears began to trickle. Sei let out a sigh and brought her face close to Sachiko's, so that their foreheads were almost touching. In that moment, Sachiko's eyes snapped back up to meet Sei's gaze.

"When you want something, you have to tell the world, Sachiko. Otherwise, how else can it come to you?"

Completely unexpectedly, Sachiko laughed. It came out rough at first, with a tired voice that had been stripped of all energy. Slowly, though, the laugh grew less dry, more natural. She laughed with her whole body, her chest and her belly vibrating with a strange kind of glee. It was like the laugh, Sei thought for some reason, of someone who had jerked awake from a bizarre nightmare and only now realized how silly their imaginary enemies had been.

Sei could remember laughing this way once. It had been the morning after she had first slept with a girl. She had realized rather abruptly that the whole time, she hadn't thought of Kubo Shiori even once—then she had laughed.

"You know, when we were outside," Sei said, "Alice asked me about Confession. I told her that no one had Confession in here, but now I realize how wrong I had been. But I'm just like you, Sachiko—I'm pathetic when it comes to love. I'm really not the person you should be going to for advice."

At this, Sachiko seemed to laugh even harder. She looked like a madman, giggling to herself in the dark sanctuary while tears streamed down her face.

"C'mon," Sei said to her, "let's get out of this place before Maria-sama's gaze drives us both crazy." She took Sachiko's arms and started to guide her to her feet, a bit surprised when she didn't resist.

As they walked down the center aisle, Sachiko grew notably quiet, a thoughtful look coming over her face. "Sei-sama, what do you think will happen to us?"

"Mm? What do you mean?"

"Until a minute ago," she said, "I was so sure of myself. Believe it or not, I thought I had it all figured out. There was a certain comfort in being trapped against the wall, having all choices taken from me, being faced with futility. But now...I have to face Yumi, don't I? Even if she rejects me?"

Sei knew that Sachiko was merely talking to herself, but she responded anyway: "There are two parts to a prayer, I think: the part where you ask, and then the part where you have to become what you asked for. If I had to guess, you were praying for courage, weren't you?"

Sachiko nodded.

"Then be courageous."

When they had removed most of the distance between them and the door, Sei almost stumbled over her own feet. She let out a cry of surprise and grabbed onto a pew for balance. "What the hell was that?"

"Ah," Sachiko said, her voice suddenly sounding very much like it usually did. "It looks like you've tripped over someone's book bag."

Sei let out a brief chuckle. "Alice must have dropped it in her panic to escape from you."

"Why on Earth would she do that, I wonder?" Then Sachiko picked it up.

When they pushed through the doors to the outside, the crisp air greeted them, and Sei felt like it was filling her with a new burst of energy. She looked at Sachiko, whose eyes had closed against the wind while she took deep lungfuls of the night air, and she decided that they were both feeling the same thing.

It took her a few seconds to spot Alice. She was hilariously crouching amongst some of the trees near the side of the chapel, looking to and fro with apparent paranoia.

"Why are you all the way over there?" Sei called out to her, making Alice start. "You look more conspicuous when you do that, you know."

Alice approached slowly, and she averted her gaze from Sachiko at first. Once she got a good look at her, though, she seemed to grow slightly more relaxed. _What a weird kid_ , Sei thought.

"Nice to see you again, Arisugawa-san," Sachiko said politely. She held out the school bag. "Here you are. You left it in the sanctuary."

"Th-thank you very much, Sachiko-sama," she stammered. She bowed so deeply that Sei mischievously imagined that she'd fall forward with the slightest push.

As Sachiko started turning to leave, Sei gave her a brief wave. "You gonna be okay on your own?" she asked.

Sachiko looked at her for a moment. The silence lasted long enough that Sei could see Alice starting to fidget uncomfortably.

"I can't thank you properly," Sachiko said finally. "So, instead, I will be as little of a burden on you as I can. You came here for a reason, and I interrupted your night, obviously. Besides, I have many things to think about."

"You have nothing to thank me for," Sei told her. She was conscious of Alice's eyes moving back and forth between the two of them. "You can stay or leave, and either way it doesn't trouble me."

Sachiko shook her head. "If Sei-sama wishes to be generous, then she will allow me to take my leave and save some face."

Sei accepted this immediately. They split apart at a fork in the path not too far from the chapel. When Sachiko was out of earshot, Alice turned to Sei, a bewildered look on her face.

"What the heck was _that_ all about?" she asked. Since Alice had fallen slightly behind, she skipped forward a bit to catch up with her.

Sei jammed her hands back into her pockets and shrugged. "Someone needed to be confessed, you could say."

Alice gave her a curious look, but Sei didn't explain further. "She must have needed quite a confession," Alice said. "Sachiko-sama looked rather scary in the chapel, to say the least." She slipped her arm underneath Sei's and took hold. They walked together like this in the bright moonlight, saying nothing, merely gliding along with the wind.

It was a short while later, when they had passed another little statue of some saint or other, that Alice broke the silence. "Hey, Sei-san," she said all of a sudden, "isn't the kanji for your first name the one that means 'holiness'?"

Sei stopped walking and looked down at Alice. "If only I lived up to that name."

"If you did, I wouldn't like you." Alice looked back at her with a completely straight face. "But in some ways, maybe you do live up to it."

Sei shook her head. There were so many unholy things that Alice had yet to learn about her—the absentminded self-centeredness with which she viewed the world, the way she was irresponsible with people's emotions and would hurt them without realizing, the pathetic wound that she had self-inflicted and still carried from a failed relationship. Sachiko had been right about her in a lot of ways; she didn't always take into account the effect that she had on others. She certainly was no saint.

Instead of explaining, though, she merely gazed down the path at a building that emerged in the distance. "With what I'm about to show you, you might change your mind real quick," she said.


	7. Chapter 7: Shadows Beyond the Stage

**Chapter 7:** **Shadows Beyond the Stage**

The way the moonlight filtered through the trees seemed oddly artificial to Sei as they neared the building. It was almost like there was a huge spotlight in the sky that was shining towards them, highlighting some spectacle for the world to see. Their bodies cast strange silhouettes on the concrete facade, and for a brief moment Sei felt like they were putting on a shadow play.

Except, they had no audience. They hadn't seen anybody else for awhile now, and the pathways all around them were entirely empty. An intense sensation of privacy hovered between them; the kind of uncomfortable solitude that whispered wicked ideas into her mind.

Alice's hand was now clasped to Sei's. Sei wasn't sure when that had happened, but it had felt natural once she had realized it. She gave her palm a squeeze as they walked towards the back of the building.

"I know this place," Alice murmured softly. "This is the auditorium, isn't it?"

"Bingo," Sei said, glancing over her shoulder to find that Alice was giving her a curious look.

"I remember doing the play here for the school festival a few years ago," Alice said. "Isn't the entrance back that way?"

"The front doors are always locked at this hour, of course, unless the drama club has a late practice."

"Oh, then why are we—?"

Sei merely grinned.

Flanked by twin rows of bushes, a small sidewalk splintered off from the main path and ran down the back of the auditorium. At the very end—Sei could see it clearly now that they had turned the corner—there was a small gray door with a metal handle.

Their feet crunched against fallen leaves as Sei pulled Alice down the narrow little path. It was out of the way, so it wasn't unusual for club members to forget to sweep the area, and Sei had spent many lunch periods hiding back there, watching the wind blow debris around aimlessly. She could vaguely remember having brought one or two underclassmen there, too, when the occasion arose that they needed to do something unobserved.

 _I guess this would be one such occasion_ , she thought to herself.

When they got to the door, she could see Alice staring at her out of the corner of her eye. She reached out and jiggled the doorknob without even a moment of hesitation, and she couldn't help but smile at the panicked look that immediately spread across Alice's face.

"Sei-san, what on Earth are you doing?"

"What does it look like I'm doing?" Sei replied mockingly. "Breaking and entering, of course."

It took her a few seconds—she hadn't done this in years and she was out of practice—but when she lifted the handle and turned it just the right way, the flimsy lock on the doorknob popped open.

"Gotcha!" Sei whispered to herself. She had wondered if they would have replaced the handle by now, but fate was on her side and they hadn't. Since no one else seemed to know that it was broken, apparently no one had bothered to fix it.

"Sei-san, are you sure we should be…?"

The rusty hinges creaked and the bottom edge of the door gave an uncomfortable scraping noise when Sei pushed it open. As a small cloud of dust hit them in the face, Sei half expected to see a colony of spiders and a couple of bats flying out next.

"Christ, has no one opened this since the last time I came in or what?" She had to struggle with the door a little to get it to open all the way, but once she did, she gestured for Alice to go ahead in front of her. "Ladies first," she said.

They both stared into the dark void of a hallway that lay before them. None of the lights were on, so all they could see were the edges of the walls a few meters in front of them, illuminated by the moonlight.

"Ha, no way," Alice told her. "This looks like the beginning of every horror movie I've ever seen."

Sei laughed. "Relax, I've been in here a million times. It's fine once you grope around for the light switch." When Alice didn't move, Sei rolled her eyes and took a step forward. "Fine, will you follow me to Hell, then? Even if you won't lead the way?"

Alice followed. The moment they set foot inside the building, a wall of stale, damp air hit Sei in the face. As she pushed deeper into the corridor, she held onto Alice with one hand and reached around for the lights with the other.

"Close the door," she whispered over her shoulder. "We don't want to draw attention to ourselves."

"What?" Alice's voice came out like a stifled whimper. "What if we get trapped in here?"

"If you don't stop being such a 'fraidy cat, then I'll take you to the girls' bathroom and introduce you to Hanako-san instead," Sei grumbled back at her.

After a moment, Sei heard the door creaking again, and the small sliver of light that had shined their way began to grow smaller, until it disappeared with a wink. A final thud sealed them inside. The hallway fell into pitch darkness, and as her other senses naturally heightened, Sei thought that she could hear Alice's heart pounding—or maybe it was her own.

That feeling of aloneness—of absolute privacy—returned suddenly. It filled Sei with the burning desire to do something wrong. She turned sharply and felt for Alice in the dark. She pushed Alice against the wall and crashed their mouths together.

The kiss landed a bit off-center. They both adjusted, though, and Alice responded with an enthusiasm that Sei hadn't expected. She reached up and threw her arms around Sei's neck, bringing her closer, opening her mouth to Sei in eager invitation.

Weeks of pent-up tension exploded all at once. Sei offered a messy kiss, deepening it as she felt Alice leaning further into her, until their bodies were pressed hard against each other. Their heavy breaths echoed through the empty corridor.

"I thought for sure...you'd put up at least a bit of a fight," Sei muttered against Alice's mouth. Her tone was a teasing one. She could feel Alice mirroring her smile. "I have to admit I'm a little disappointed."

"Fight?" Alice asked, then kissed her once more. It was a quick, inexperienced kiss, but it left Sei's lips seething nonetheless. "Why would I want to fight?"

"Mmm, you're much too obvious, Alice. Hide what you want from me a little. Pretend you don't want it. Don't make it too easy for me, or I'll take everything all at once." She let her hands slip down to the back of Alice's hips and then pulled her in roughly, until the bottom half of their bodies were thrust tightly together.

Alice gasped. Sei could feel her again—warm, pulsing, but a bit firmer than what she was used to. She didn't pull back this time, though; she grabbed Alice by the back of the neck and pulled her up for another burning kiss.

Sei was starting to rotate her hips unconsciously and their kissing had grown increasingly sloppy—and then she felt the palms of Alice's hands press against her shoulders. Alice groaned and pushed her away.

"Ah, ready to fight now?" Sei teased. She heaved a few loud breaths. She hadn't realized how much oxygen she had deprived herself of until she noticed that she was actually a touch dizzy. Nonetheless, she leaned back in for another kiss, and Alice's hands reached out yet again to gently push her back.

Sei could have easily overpowered her resistance. Instead, though, she gave her a puzzled look that Alice wouldn't have been able to see in the dark. "You okay?" she asked. She tried to ignore the now insistent throbbing in the southernmost regions of her body.

"Yeah, but if you keep doing that, I…," Alice began, her tone clearly one of embarrassment.

Sei took a step closer to Alice again, until she could feel the girl's breath on her face. "If I keep doing... _what?_ "

She heard Alice's body sliding against the wall, her limbs shifting around frantically. "If you do that, I'll...I…." There was a brief clack of what sounded like plastic. "Oh, I think I found the light switch!"

"Hm?"

An audible click echoed through the otherwise silent hallway. Overhead, a warm electric buzzing sound was the first evidence of life. Then, less than a second later, the fluorescent lights flickered on overhead—first with a brownish, off-yellow glow, and then finally as a bath of white light that flooded through the corridor.

Sei found herself staring up at the ceiling momentarily in surprise, but before long she looked back down at Alice.

The girl must have noticed Sei's much too serious look because she was smiling at her sheepishly. "Uh, hi," Alice said, lifting a hand and waving vaguely.

It was like the mood had disappeared with the darkness. The florescent lighting bounced off the bland white walls and tiled floor, making the place look more like a hospital than the endless maze that it seemed to be before.

Sei scratched her head. "Huh. Um, okay," she said, looking around, as if she had just woken up from a dream.

Besides a few cobwebs near the lights, the place looked surprisingly clean, and it was otherwise exactly as she had remembered it. Sei turned to face away from where they had come in, looking down the hallway at the small wooden door near the end. "C'mon," she said, tipping her head in that direction. "There's something I wanted to show you."

Alice picked up her school bag—which she had dropped once again at some point—and followed with a meekness that contrasted her earlier bold groping.

"Why are you still carrying around all that baggage?" Sei asked her.

She shrugged. "I thought we were going to study tonight."

"You should know better than that by now, Alice."

Just as Sei had recalled, the old door at the end of the hall was a little hard to open. With a few tugs, it came loose, though, and before long they were presented with a wooden staircase that led up to a landing. It was only a few steps up, but beyond the landing, there was more darkness.

"I'll go first," Sei said this time, before Alice could protest. She hopped quickly up the steps, a hundred creaky sounds reverberating through the space as the floorboards settled under her weight. She heard Alice quickly following behind her.

This time, she didn't conveniently forget where the light switch was. When they got to the top of the landing, she slapped her hand on the familiar spot and the lights came on instantly. These were incandescent, so they gave the room a soft warm glow instead of the artificial intensity of the hallway. With a flick of the switch right next to it, she was able to shroud the hallway back into a state of darkness.

Alice looked over her shoulder, a bit uneasy.

"Stop looking so spooked. If we don't turn them off for now, someone might see the light between the cracks of the outside door and notice that we're here," Sei said, pulling Alice into the new space that they had found themselves in.

The room smelled like paint and musty old clothes. It really gave Sei a nostalgic feeling; a few memories from her third year at Lillian Academy floated back into her mind.

"Are we...backstage?" Alice asked, stepping into the room and looking around. She closed the wooden door gently behind her.

"Yes," Sei said. "We're in a dressing room. Take off your shoes." She walked up to one of the many clothing racks and reached out to take hold of the sleeve of a familiar outfit. It was one of the princely royal ball costumes that the understudies had worn during _Cinderella_ nearly four years before. She was surprised to see that it was still there. _I guess it makes sense to recycle such expensive costumes,_ she thought to herself.

She looked over at Alice and saw that the girl had dutifully sat down on the floor and was neatly removing her sneakers. "What about you, Sei-san?" she said, her tone a bit accusatory.

Sei looked down at her feet and saw that she had tracked in a few of the crinkly leaves from outside, and she was already halfway into the room. She shrugged and wiggled her feet out of her outdoor shoes, then kicked them aside.

"Kashiwagi-san was right about you," Alice said.

"Kashiwagi's feet may not be as dirty as mine, but that doesn't mean the rest of him is clean," Sei replied.

Alice smirked at her. She stood up carefully, following Sei's movements with her eyes, her gaze seemingly scanning the array of costumes. Sei noticed that her eyes stopped at a section filled with elegant fairytale-style dresses.

"Wasn't there something that you wanted to show me?" Alice asked.

Sei nodded, then she promptly dove in between one of the racks and buried herself between two thick velvet overcoats. The smell of mothballs made her cough and the fuzz tickled her ears uncomfortably, but she could almost reach the back wall when she stretched an arm out towards it.

"Sei-san?" Alice's bewildered voice rang out.

 _It's around here somewhere,_ Sei thought, feeling for the box that she knew had been flush against the wall. Before long, as she groped blindly behind the clothes rack, she realized that it was no longer where she had remembered. _Of course, some things have to have changed, right?_ she thought. _Even in an eternal place like Lillian Girl's Academy._

Just as she was about to give up, though, her hand grazed a piece of cardboard. _Or maybe I spoke too soon._

"It's a miracle!" she declared as she pulled the box out from behind the rack. "Not exactly where I remember, but close enough. Looks like someone's rummaged in here, too." She dropped the box onto the floor and starting digging through it with no hesitation, as if it were her own sock drawer. Even after all of those years, she had never lost that sense of familiarity with Lillian Academy—maybe she was a little too familiar, in fact.

"Ah-ha!" Sei said, just as she found herself grasping the eternal black fabric between her fingers. It felt rougher than she remembered.

Alice had come to stand close to her. "What, what is it?" She was peering into the box as well. A small bug suddenly crawled out as Sei continued to disturb the contents, and it made Alice jump and let out a sharp yelp.

Sei laughed. "Hope that little guy hasn't been chewing any holes in this. You gotta respect tradition!" Then she jerked the dress sharply out of the box, a dozen other small objects sliding off the fabric and clattering together to the bottom. A cloud of dust billowed out and both she and Alice fell into a duet of coughing fits for a few seconds.

After they recovered, Sei rose to her feet, holding the outfit up with the tips of her fingers, looking at it with a nostalgic smile.

"Is that…?" Alice began to ask.

"Yes, indeed," Sei said to her. "This is the official Lillian Academy school uniform—and just your size, I think."

"Wha—what?" Alice seemed taken aback. She pulled away slightly and immediately started shaking her head. "I can't put that on. What if somebody sees?"

Sei rolled her eyes. "We're alone in this dressing room. Who's going to see you?" She gave the dress a few thrusts, like an old throw rug, letting some of the residual fuzz and dust bunnies fly off. "It's a little old—I remember a first year left it in here when we were doing _Cinderella_ and never came back for it—but it's still in pretty good condition and it should suit you just fine. She was around your height." Sei held up the dress in front of Alice and Alice's eyes seemed to finally wander along the creases and pleats of the uniform with growing interest.

"You...really think it'll be okay?" she asked. Her eyes appeared to shift with some inner conflict.

"'Course. I brought you here because there are tons of costumes for you to try on, and I figured you liked that sort of thing, especially now that you don't get much of a chance to wear what you want. But I also know that what you _really_ wanted to wear was this." She offered the dress to Alice, but the girl didn't take it just yet.

"It's not a costume, though," Alice said, reaching out tentatively, running her fingers along the back of the sailor collar. Her hand came to rest on Sei's knuckles. "It's a uniform."

Sei shrugged. "Same difference. We were all playing a role back then. If we didn't have roles to play, then we'd be walking around naked, wouldn't we?" Sei pressed the uniform against Alice's chest and winked at her. "Throw this on first, though. We can worry about the naked stuff later."

Alice's face lit up with a furious blush, but she finally took the uniform and held it against her body. Her eyes started darting around the room excitedly. "Where can I change?"

"Here." Sei opened her arms to indicate the whole space. "This is a dressing room, after all."

Alice took a step towards a corner of the room, but then hesitated when she seemed to notice that Sei was following her movements. "If I change over here, are you going to look?"

"Yes, of course I'll look," Sei said without an ounce of shame. _Why would I not look?_ she thought.

"Oh…," Alice mumbled. She appeared to have been taken off guard by Sei's frankness and at first she simply stood there, her gaze moving around the room. Finally, she pulled a rack of thick clothes away from the wall and started to slip behind it. "If I change back here, do you promise not to look?"

"Sure," Sei answered immediately. She grinned at Alice.

Alice's tiny frame was still partially visible behind the rack, and her large eyes peered back at Sei with expectation. "Are you lying right now?"

"Yes, that's right. I'm lying," Sei answered again. _Why would I not be lying?_ she thought to herself.

This time it was Alice who rolled her eyes. She ducked behind the rack until her whole body disappeared, and Sei let out an exaggerated huff.

"You can't hide from me forever," she said jokingly. Still, she stayed put and didn't try to crane her neck to catch a glimpse. Instead, she listened to the sounds of rustling clothes and she looked down towards the bottom of the rack when she noticed that Alice had dropped her jeans. She could barely see the girl's ankles peaking out of her socks as she stepped out of her trouser legs.

It struck her that this was only the second time she had seen any part of Alice's bare legs; besides the first night they had met, Alice had covered herself up in male clothes and very little of her skin had been apparent. As Sei trained her eyes on what little she could see, she noticed that the girl's skin was smooth, her legs seeming rather pale even in the soft light, and she wondered momentarily if Alice was naturally this hairless, or if she shaved herself.

 _There are a lot of things I don't know about her body, come to think of it,_ Sei thought. She realized that whenever she had imagined Alice naked before, she had pictured the form of a typical girl. Alice did have a very feminine shape to her, but of course there would be a few things missing underneath her clothes—and a few things that were extra.

Sei scratched the back of her head and tried to remember what she had learned in anatomy class. Some images came to mind, but even then, those were only drawings or photographs, and rather clinical at that. They seemed wholly unrelated to the warm flesh and bright smile of the girl who was standing naked behind a clothes rack, only meters away.

Even more than before, Sei was tempted to look. It was more than innocent curiosity, she knew. Her intentions were a mix of lustful fascination, a touch of confusion, and the intense need to simply know what she was getting herself into.

 _I like a good mystery,_ she thought, _but even mysteries have to be resolved eventually._

Without thinking, she reached out and pushed her hand between two of the coats that hung between her and Alice. Her other hand soon joined and she stood there for a moment, her arms flexed with tension, ready to push the two barriers apart, if not for a sudden rush of hesitation.

"Alice," she said. "I'm going to look now." But Alice had already stopped moving abruptly, had already seemed to notice Sei's encroaching presence.

Sei waited. She would give Alice a chance to back away, to cover herself up. If it wasn't what she really wanted, then she didn't want to make the girl expose herself. For a few moments, no movement came—and then, she heard the sound of something light hitting the ground. Sei looked down and caught sight of the fluttering pleats of the official Lillian Academy uniform as it fell into a heap on the wooden panels of the floor.

She heard a ragged breath escaping Alice's mouth from the other side. Sei nodded to herself and, with permission now granted, began to slowly pull the two rows of costumes apart. A small opening emerged. She could see a brief flash of some skin at first, but little else.

Then, a sudden burst of energy seemed to jolt through her bones. Sei jerked her arms to either side, as if she were opening a pair of curtains to greet the beautiful spring morning outside her window, as if she were an exhibitionist ripping open a trench coat and lecherously waiting for a reaction. The metal hangers on the rack squeaked in angry unison as they slid across the rods.

She looked.

The girl who looked back at her was shaking with nervous energy. She wasn't entirely nude, but everything was off except for a pair of tiny underwear. Her bony frame was wrapped in milky smooth skin that flowed down from her small shoulders to a soft chest and a narrow ribcage. Her nipples, Sei noticed, were a bit smaller than she was used to seeing, but they did stick out a little—she wasn't as flat as Sei had originally assumed. As she looked further down, shamelessly scanning every centimeter with her eyes, she could see a few of the young woman's ribs and the valley of a few tense muscles around her middle. She wondered if this taut skin would feel the same against her mouth as Alice's sinewy neck had.

Then, she spotted the top of her briefs. For some reason, Sei found that her eyes lingered here the longest. Through the thin white fabric of Alice's underwear, Sei could see the outline of...something. Her brain wasn't sure how to interpret it, how to make it take shape in her mind.

She reached out and hooked her fingers over the edge of the elastic waistband. Alice's skin felt hot against the back of her hand, and Sei slowly began to pull, leaning forward, her body moving closer, her gaze rolling slowly over the edge of that cotton barrier. The first thing she saw was a sparse pattern of hair.

And then Alice slapped her hand away before she could see anything more. The waistband slipped from her fingers with a snap. It seemed to echo throughout the whole room.

Sei jerked, as if broken from a trance. She quickly looked up at Alice, and saw that the girl was heaving, shuddering. She was staring straight at Sei with wide-eyed confusion.

"Why...did you do that?" she asked. "You can see everything else. Just...not that."

Sei looked at her with a bit of surprise, her arm still reaching out, her body in the same posture it had been only a moment before the motion had been cut off. "Okay," Sei said to her quietly.

As she began to lean her weight back and take in Alice's startled face, she couldn't help but feel like there was something obvious that she had stupidly overlooked. The girl looked flustered, embarrassed—but it was more than that. Alice's body had recoiled a little, had settled into what looked like a flinch that hadn't quite worn off. It was almost as if...

 _Of course,_ Sei realized suddenly. _She doesn't like what she has there._ Sei felt like an idiot. It hadn't crossed her mind at all that the girl might have felt uncomfortable with that part of her body in and of itself. She had assumed at first that it had been simple modesty, but now she noticed that Alice had been averting her eyes from her own body.

"Even _I_ don't look...at myself," Alice whispered.

Sei nodded slowly, a few wires connecting in her mind. Years ago, when she had been agonizing over her relationship with Shiori, she had wished to herself that gender hadn't been created by God, because it just seemed to make things so much more complicated. She had actually envied worms at the time for their carefree hermaphroditic existence.

But her issue had been with cultural gender roles. It had seemed so unfair to her that she couldn't have a normal romance with Shiori simply because she was a girl, because it would defy social expectations. When it came to her body, though, she didn't care. She was fine with what she had—in fact, it seemed like such a good fit to her that she had never even questioned it.

Alice was different, though. Sei had had an inkling of it before, but the big picture occurred to her only then: for Alice, it wasn't about clothes, or gender roles, or wearing this costume instead of another one. Alice's body _was_ the costume.

For some reason that she could not yet fully understand, a wave of heat rose to Sei's face and spread into the bottom of her eyes. She felt a pair of small, warm tears escape, but she bit back the rest and quickly looked away before Alice seemed to notice.

"I'm sorry," Sei whispered back to her. It wasn't an apology for anything that she had personally done, though. Rather, it felt like she was apologizing in God's place.

Two hands came to grasp one of her now clenched fists. "It's...it's okay," Alice replied, her voice sounding a bit alarmed. "Really, it's fine. You don't have to be sorry. I've never let anyone...get so close to me before." There was a pause. "Thank you." She had said the last part in such a soft voice that Sei almost hadn't heard. The tone also sounded like she had meant to say something else—a much more intimate phrase—but Sei decided in that instant that there was no way she would entertain such a thought.

When Sei pulled away from her, Alice seemed to notice the uniform at her feet once again. She hastily picked it up, as if she didn't want it to be ruined, and Sei found it a little funny that it was only now that she remembered that she had dropped it.

Sei watched intently as the girl pulled it over her head. She was clumsily wriggling into the uniform—which seemed to fit well enough—and Sei had to suppress both a laugh and the urge to help her put it on. Once her head popped out of the top, it seemed to come easier though. Her arms quickly followed suit through the sleeves, and before long she was smoothing out the skirt with her hands.

When Alice tried tying the scarf around her neck, Sei reached out this time to help her fix it. Their hands brushed momentarily in a battle of wills, but eventually Sei's insistent groping won out, and she straightened out the girl's tie with a few sharp tugs.

It reminded her a little too much of those times she had flirted with blushing first years at Lillian Academy.

"Well," said Sei, moving back a little to admire her own handiwork. "You look like a Lillian girl if I've ever seen one. Come on out of there and let's take a good look at you."

Alice emerged sheepishly from behind the rack, but once she had stepped into the middle of the room, her face was alight with a wide smile. "I wish I could look in a mirror," she said, gazing down at the pleats of the dress.

Sei took her by the shoulder and led her to the opposite corner of the room, where a narrow full-length mirror in a cheap plastic frame lay propped up against the wall. There were a few smudges here and there on the glass, but when Alice peered into it, this didn't seem to matter. She took in a sharp breath and covered her smiling mouth with her hand.

"Sei-san, it looks great!" she said. She took a step closer to the image of herself and stared for a long moment. "I really do look like a Lillian student."

Sei, who was standing behind her, wrapped her arms around Alice's waist. To Sei's mild relief, Alice didn't resist at all, and instead leaned back to press her body closer. It was strange how well they fit together—Sei's taller, looming form against Alice's dainty frame. There was an irony in this, Sei thought just then, in that they had both been expected by society to inhabit the other's place.

Then soon enough Sei became distracted with the feeling of Alice's warm back against the length of her body, with the distinct smell of Alice's skin. It filled the pit of her stomach—and a place slightly further down from there—with an inexplicable sensation of growing heat.

She stooped down and put her mouth at the juncture of Alice's jaw and neck, right at the point where the girl's pulse was noticeably throbbing. It started out as a soft, chaste kiss, but when she heard Alice gasp, she opened her mouth and started to suck lightly on the skin there.

When Sei began to pull back, Alice turned her head up to look at her. She stared at Sei with a desperate gaze, with a look that seemed hungrier than before. She seemed to be asking Sei for something, but it wasn't totally clear what that was.

Sei immediately took a guess. She kissed Alice on the mouth, deepening it as soon as she felt Alice's lips open in response, and they stood their for a few moments exploring each other, feeling the heat of each other's breaths. Sei let her hands wander to Alice's upper body and smiled when she felt the girl lean into her touch. She caressed her torso, then her chest, feeling every centimeter of skin through the fabric of her dress, never breaking the kiss between them—the kiss that was growing increasingly violent.

But it wasn't enough.

Sei pulled away a little, her mouth still lightly brushing Alice's lips. Her whole body felt like it was burning from the inside out. "I want—I want...," she sighed, unable to put it into words.

Alice seemed to understand nonetheless. She mirrored Sei's helpless expression and looked directly up at her. "I know," she whispered. "Me too. I want it, too."

 _Yes,_ Sei thought. _But you don't even want me to look._ After all, how could she do anything like that if she couldn't even look at her there? Naturally, she could just reverse things and have Alice do all the exploring, but she wasn't into the idea of not reciprocating. Wasn't reciprocating the whole point, anyway? It certainly was Sei's favorite part.

But if she couldn't even _look_ there, even if she wanted to, then…

Another thought came. Sei's hands slid down the front of Alice's body and she felt the girl shudder against her touch. When Sei's fingers hovered dangerously over Alice's lower torso, Alice seemed to unconsciously lean her hips up to meet them.

Sei pressed her face to the girl's neck again. "Alice," she murmured against her skin, "you don't want me to see anything—but what if I only...touch?"

In a movement that seemed to spring from every bone in her body, Alice grabbed Sei's left hand tightly by the wrist. For a moment, Sei worried that she had done something wrong, but then Alice quickly pulled Sei's hand underneath her skirt and pressed Sei's palm hard against the juncture of her legs.

Sei gasped. It was seething with heat. It was beyond the warmth of a human body—it was pulsing with life and she could feel the blood coursing through it, even over the thin underwear that separated her from the raw skin. It was so unlike what she had felt before under any other girl's dress that she was momentarily shocked into a state of extreme discomfort, even as her arousal intensified.

Yet, there was something familiar underneath it all. A sensation of softness underneath the firmness, a trickling moisture that seemed...human. Not male, not female; simply human and nothing more.

She recovered after a second. She squeezed and Alice let out a sigh. Sei quickly slipped her right hand underneath to join the other. Moments later, even this wasn't enough, and she slid her hands past the final barrier until there was nothing separating her from Alice's naked skin.

She silenced Alice's groan with a kiss. They stood there for a moment, unmoving, both enjoying the reality of the moment and hovering in a state of uncertainty. Sei wasn't quite sure what to do at first.

She had come _this_ far, though.

Her lips still very much locked with Alice's, she tried something with her hands. When that didn't seem to get a reaction, she tried something else, then touched another place. She slowly explored like this until she felt a small yelp of surprise escape from the girl below her.

 _All right, now we have something._

She repeated the movement, and a shudder burst through Alice's body.

Sei couldn't help the grin that spread across her face. When she pulled back to look at Alice, the girl's cheeks were furiously red. _We definitely have something there._ Sei took the embarrassment as a good sign and took Alice's lips with her own once again.

She explored some more, noting Alice's small reactions, and before long they had worked into a rhythm. They were rocking against each other, mouths sliding desperately, Sei's hands buried deeply in the folds of Alice's skirt. She felt the back of Alice's hips knock into her more insistently and she bucked hard in response, clasping Alice's body against her tightly.

They were lost in their movements, in a bubble of warm skin and tongues and teeth. Sei felt herself dissolve for a short moment, felt all of her awareness falling entirely on the small, gasping body that she held in her arms. It was like they both had slipped into a dream together.

Then Alice seemed to start waking up. Sei noticed the tenseness in the girl's body first, before anything—but she ignored it.

"S-Sei-san," Alice whispered, "I'm going to..."

Sei pulled her closer, gave her a messy kiss where her throat met her collar bone.

"Ah! Sei-san, _please_. Sei-san—"

And so Sei quickened the pace of her caresses, and pressed her face hard against Alice's neck. She felt a rush of energy between them all of a sudden, a flexing of such huge tension that she had to steady her legs to avoid falling forward.

It was only when she moved her head to reach Alice's lips again that she noticed that anything was wrong. Alice wouldn't kiss her.

"Sei-san, please, _stop_! I'm—"

But it was already happening. Sei only realized after a moment, after she felt the presence of something new down there, something she somehow hadn't considered at all.

It took Sei completely by surprise and she could only look on in awe as Alice turned her head slightly and buried her face in the muscle of Sei's upper chest. Sei felt the rumbling vibrations of the girl's groans, the reluctance of the girl to give in, and finally the shudders that racked the entirety of her body seemingly beyond her conscious control. Sei shuddered in response, that fiery feeling in her core having spread to every part of her.

She wanted nothing more than to grab the girl by the back of the head and press a kiss to her mouth. But when she tried, Alice still wouldn't kiss her.

She wouldn't even look at her.

"What...what's wrong?" Sei asked, throwing Alice a confused glance.

She didn't respond. She reached down and pulled Sei's hands away, stepping forward in one panicked movement. She darted to the side, towards one of the clothes racks. Sei made a move to follow her, but Alice pushed her back with both hands.

Sei stared at her with bewilderment. "Alice?" She tried to catch the girl's gaze, but she still would not look at Sei.

"I...I can't…." Alice's hands were up, palms out, and she was looking at the ground. Sei noticed with some alarm that her eyes were welling up with tears.

"Look," Sei said quickly, "we can talk about this. What happened? Did I do something wrong?"

When she took another step forward, though, this only seemed to spook Alice even further. The girl suddenly turned and rushed towards the wooden door at the end of the room.

"Alice? What are you doing?" Sei's feet thudded against the wooden floor—then the stairwell—as she followed Alice towards the corridor that they had used to come in.

Alice was fast, though, and none of her earlier hesitation seemed to have stayed with her. The pleats of her skirt fluttered as she jumped down the tiny steps and then disappeared into the darkness of the hallway. The quick shuffle of the girl's sock-clad feet echoed through the space. Sei had made it to the bottom of the stairs when she saw a wide blast of moonlight filling the corridor.

The door with the broken handle was open. Alice's silhouette hovered in the frame for a moment, her shape indistinguishable from that of any other Lillian girl in a Lillian costume. She didn't turn to look back at Sei when she stepped out.

"Alice? Alice!" Sei's calls rang out through the hallway.

Then the door slammed shut, and Alice had disappeared.


	8. Chapter 8: Ghosts

**Chapter 8: Ghosts**

At the very edge of her vision, Yumi could have sworn that she saw a girl.

True that it was only a quick flash, and that when she turned her head, the street looked as empty as it had before, but for a moment she could distinctly see the shape of a high school student dashing past the corner. There hadn't been much time for detail, especially considering the dim light, but she was almost certain that she had seen the waving folds of that uniform—the Lillian uniform—flapping away in the wind.

In fact, the girl had kind of looked like herself.

Yumi put her face in her hands and sighed deeply, but she kept walking. It was nothing; just a mirage. Why would a Lillian Academy student be running around alone so late in the evening?

Then again, wasn't that what she was doing herself, albeit a bit more slowly and aimlessly? Immediately following her afternoon classes, she had rushed off the school grounds, her now daily habit of avoiding Sachiko kicking into full gear.

For a reason that she couldn't quite pinpoint, though, something inside of her resisted the notion of going home as well. She wasn't in the mood to sit on a bus or a train. She wanted to keep moving on her own power, as if there were an accumulated store of energy inside of her that needed to be exhausted. So instead, she meandered for a long time in the neighborhoods surrounding the hills, visiting a coffeehouse and then a few shops, and finally wandering around the park until the daylight started to grow thin.

And so she found herself here, shuffling along the empty side streets near Lillian, floating around like a ghost with no certain haunting place.

 _A ghost._ Maybe that's what she had seen earlier.

When she finally gave in and slumped into a bench near the bus stop, her eyes seemed to immediately close on their own. She wasn't tired—she didn't feel much of anything, as all the walking had seemed to push her into this plane that was devoid of emotion—but her brain had been dancing around in a dreamy haze all day.

She took a deep breath. Everything seemed to become still. Even the sounds of the few cars that slipped by seemed to fade into the background of her senses. _Is this what meditating feels like?_ she wondered. She had always been more of the praying type—talking to Maria-sama as opposed to listening to her. _If I listened, though,_ she thought, _what would she have to say? Would I even hear her through all the noise?_

"Yumi."

Yumi let out a startled screech and jolted out of her seat. Her eyes snapped open.

The voice had come from behind her—it had been soft, probably not much more than a whisper, but it had nonetheless shaken her out of her daze much too suddenly. It was only after a second that she realized how familiar the voice had been. It was that same polite severity, that same inflection that made her name sound like a question.

She twisted her head around and felt her face immediately grow warm. It was Ogasawara Sachiko, of course.

Usually, her Onee-sama was quick to scold her whenever she freaked out like this, especially in public, but this time Sachiko didn't say anything. Instead, she merely looked at Yumi carefully, her hands clasped together in front of her, her posture impeccable as usual. She was leaning forward ever so slightly, as if she were in the midst of deciding whether to take another step towards her or not.

"Onee-sama," Yumi said softly.

There was a complicated expression on Sachiko's face, one that Yumi didn't quite understand. She could detect an odd serenity in Sachiko—a far-away look—but also a touch of uncertainty when their eyes met directly. "So, you're still calling me that after all," she said.

Yes, apparently she was. The title had just flowed out of her mouth, completely without any conscious thought. Without having to ponder it much, though, Yumi knew that she hadn't spoken mistakenly.

She stared at the pale woman who stood before her. She watched as a strong gust of wind blew against them and the locks of Sachiko's silky hair billowed like the streamers of a zig-zagging kite. Sachiko's body nearly buckled; it was subtle, but Yumi could see how she had to shuffle slightly with her feet and lean into the wind to keep from stumbling. She did it with such refinement, that she made it look almost as if it had been completely on purpose. Sachiko could make anything look like it was on purpose.

But Sachiko was so very, very fragile. Underneath the facade, Yumi knew that it was incredibly easy to destroy her emotionally, especially when it was someone that Sachiko cared about who was hurting her. In a lot of ways, Yumi was her biggest vulnerability. This was why Yumi had always tiptoed around Sachiko's eggshells very carefully, had always taken her position as _imouto_ with a huge sense of responsibility.

She wasn't sure if she could take that burden much longer, though. Too many of the things that she wanted required hurting Sachiko.

"Look at me, Yumi." The voice was soft and insistent. It made Yumi realize that she had averted her eyes. "You may not want to face me now, and I don't blame you after what happened between us—but if we don't talk about this, then what will become of our _soeur_ ship?"

"So it's the _soeur_ relationship that Onee-sama wants to save?" Yumi found herself saying. Even though she was older now and had grown more bold, she still felt a bit uncomfortable talking to Sachiko so plainly, not veiling her words in the veneer of roundabout politeness that she had tended to use before.

She knew it was better this way, though. Every milligram of politeness meant the sacrifice of a milligram of clarity.

She was a little surprised to see Sachiko shaking her head. "No, you're right, I am more than your Onee-sama," Sachiko said. "I don't know what I am to you exactly, but I don't think we can honestly say that we're merely _soeurs_. I don't even know if what we have has a definition, but I want to salvage _the relationship between us_ —whatever that may be."

Yumi stared at her, completely taken off guard. What Sachiko said was entirely true—in fact, several of the relationships in Yumi's life hovered in a gray area like this—but she hadn't expected her to so openly acknowledge it. Where had this naked honesty come from all of a sudden? At first, she didn't know what to say in response.

Sachiko only smiled at her. "Let's take a walk, Yumi."

Though her feet were tired from all of her earlier wandering, she did not protest. She followed her Onee-sama down the walkway that lined the outside of the school, their steps quickly falling into their usual matching rhythm. It had been a long time since they had walked together like this, but Yumi found herself absorbed in the pattern easily, like she was picking up an old habit.

She pulled up beside Sachiko and looked up into her face. The bottom edge of the older woman's eyes were a bit puffy, she noticed, but otherwise her face seemed strangely relaxed in a way that was almost startling. It made Yumi realize then that Sachiko often carried a certain base degree of tension around the corners of her eyes and mouth—a tension that was conspicuously absent now.

"I've given in," Sachiko said all of a sudden, as if she were answering Yumi's unspoken question. "Whatever you decide that you want, Yumi, I accept it. It's not often I feel this way about anything, so take advantage of my mood. Soon enough I will slip back into my usual hysterics." When she turned to look back at Yumi, her eyes were alight with energy, with something like amusement.

Yumi was taken aback. She couldn't help but raise her eyebrows in surprise, which only seemed to make Sachiko's odd smile widen. Yumi had never seen anything quite like this on Sachiko's face before, even after years together.

"Perhaps a bit of Sei-sama has rubbed off on me."

Yumi came to a halt. "You spoke to Sei-sama?"

"Briefly," Sachiko replied, but she kept walking away from the school, and Yumi quickly began following again.

 _How strange,_ Yumi thought. Sachiko-sama and Sei-sama were always on good terms, but they were not particularly close, and they probably wouldn't even speak to each other at all if it weren't for the fact that Sei's best friend was Sachiko's Onee-sama.

"When did you see Sei-sama?" Yumi asked. _And why?_ she thought, though she didn't voice this. She couldn't help but look over her shoulder on reflex and scan the streets a little for Sei's lanky figure. It struck her that she could sometimes feel Sei's presence if she concentrated hard enough. Maybe Yumi had called her to the area unconsciously somehow—or maybe it was just her imagination. At any rate, Satou Sei was nowhere to be found in the immediate vicinity.

"I was praying in the sanctuary and we ran into each other," Sachiko explained. "I suppose you could say that we had a heart-to-heart."

"What about?" Yumi had tried to keep her tone neutral, one with no expectation, but she had failed. She sounded nervous even to her own ears.

But Sachiko kept walking. They passed slowly by a row of convenience stores and a 100-yen shop. They turned a nearby corner and advanced along a street that paralleled the train tracks. They walked for so long in silence, that Yumi was finally sure that Sachiko must not have heard her question.

Then she answered: "We talked about a lot of things, Yumi. For the most part, though, we talked about me, about what I was hiding from myself—and from you." She stopped. Her heels slid lightly across the gravel on the side of the tracks as she turned to look at Yumi. Some of the tension was back on her face, her eyes were wider and a smattering of moisture in them gleamed very conspicuously in the moonlight.

Once again, Yumi was taken by surprise.

Sachiko seemed to steel herself for something. Her muscles flexed, and then it all came tumbling out: "I love you, Yumi," she said. "It's the kind of love that you may be unable to return, as I understand it, but I can't pretend that it isn't there. I can't simply hide behind social convention and hope that I can still reap the benefits of an honest relationship with you. I can't avoid conveying my feelings and then pretend somehow that you will receive what I have to express. It's not fair to you. I cannot make you suffer when I alone am the one who deserves this torment—it is I who is the coward."

Yumi stared at her. A few tears had finally spilled over onto Sachiko's cheeks and her hands clenched at her sides in a pair of tight fists. At first, she began averting her eyes from Yumi's gaze, but within a matter of a few seconds, she doubled back and seemingly forced herself to look straight into Yumi's eyes.

There was a question in her expression. She wanted Yumi to answer.

"Onee-sama…," Yumi began. She took a step towards the older woman, reaching out, but not quite touching her.

What _was_ her answer? What did Yumi really want from her? If she was honest with herself, the answer was that she didn't want anything at all. She loved Sachiko just as she was, and could never ask anything of her that would ever make their relationship more satisfying. Whether they were _soeurs_ or not, whether they had kissed or not, whether Yumi had carried unrequited romantic feelings around for years or not—it all seemed so small and insignificant in that moment. It was so unimportant in the face of...

 _What we have with each other_ , Yumi thought just then _, is more important than anything we could possibly call it._

In fact, it was the same with anyone she had ever loved, romantically or not. It was the same with Touko, it was the same with Satou Sei-sama. There was no name for what she felt for Sachiko. She could probably stand there and try to come up with a million words for it, and still not a single one would fit.

She could try to put it into a box, to definitively call Sachiko her sister or her schoolmate or her lover, to draw a line so that then she could decide whether Sachiko had crossed it on that awkward day...but she couldn't. Every time she tried to make sense of it, to draw a boundary, she felt more detached, like she wasn't even experiencing this moment with Sachiko, like she was retreating into the realm of her fuzzy mind and watching the whole ordeal as if it were happening to someone else.

And she wanted desperately, more than anything, to _experience_ Sachiko. As she stood there in a daze, she realized that the only thing that had ever brought her joy in their relationship was the opportunity to experience Sachiko directly—not to admire from afar, nor to condemn her, nor to think about her dreamily, but to see her right there in front of her, as she was, to smell her light perfume, to taste...

Oddly enough, an image burst into her mind suddenly, an image of her body pressed tightly against the lean frame of Sei-sama, of all people. Then, just as quickly, she felt the urge to run into Sachiko's arms. The two images seemed to melt together.

She held herself back.

 _What is this?_ Yumi thought to herself. _This doesn't make any sense..._ Her face was burning.

But she was done trying to force things to make sense.

When she looked up and focused again on the vulnerable face that stared back at her, she realized that her chest had been welling up with a sensation that she couldn't understand. It was what she had felt the week before, when Sei had dropped her off at home. It wasn't simple happiness and it wasn't sadness, either—instead, it was just a swelling, a sensation of expansion with seemingly no meaning.

The tears came for her, too, and rather suddenly. They weren't as dignified as Sachiko's, they were accompanied by shudders that only seemed to alarm the woman in front of her. She waved her hand to allay Sachiko's concerns, and she tried to meet her eyes straight on.

When she was ready to speak, the first few syllables came out breathlessly. "Onee-sama, I want to...get to know you," Yumi said finally. "Outside of tradition, outside of convention. I want to get to know you again, this time without these barriers between us. I want to know who Onee-sama is; I want to know everything about you."

Yumi wasn't sure what happened first—if Sachiko had opened her arms, or if Yumi had dashed towards her—but they clasped against each other in a powerful embrace. She pressed her face to Sachiko's chest, her eyes closed so tightly that colored sparks burst in the darkness of her vision.

"You may not like what you learn about me," Sachiko whispered, her lips pressing lightly against Yumi's cheek.

"I don't care," Yumi said—and she meant it. "How could I say that I truly love Onee-sama if I don't love even the things that I dislike about her? What kind of love would that be?"

Sachiko took in a sharp breath and tightened the embrace.

The train was coming. Yumi could hear it, could feel the woosh of energy and air coming from far away. The crossing gates began to ding, and the warmth of Sachiko's body was suddenly absent, and the unpleasant sensation of Yumi's shoulder stretching nearly out of its socket quickly replaced it.

Sachiko yanked her by the arm, away from the tracks and towards the sidewalk. Yumi opened her eyes and found that she was once again standing close to her Onee-sama, surrounded in a sea of Sachiko's hair. Through the veil of the strands she finally noticed exactly where they were.

After all this time, they had somehow walked all the way to a train station. In her supreme state of distraction, she hadn't even realized where they had been going. She wondered if Sachiko had walked here on purpose.

Sachiko held her tightly by the wrist and looked into her eyes. "I accept this," she said. "I accept your reply as a gift from God. My second prayer has been answered. Let's go."

Before Yumi could even process what she had said, Sachiko led her up the steps towards the station. They made it to the platform just as the doors of the steel giant were swishing open.

Sachiko gave her another mysterious look and let go of her hand. "We have a lot to talk about, but it can wait until we've both calmed down." She turned towards the widening doors of the train. "I know that you usually take the bus to the M station and then go home from there, but something tells me that you have somewhere else to be tonight." When Yumi stared at her in surprise, Sachiko merely smiled and asked, "Am I wrong?"

Yumi shook her head. Obediently, she stepped over the crack between the platform and the train, and turned to face her Onee-sama. As the doors began to squeeze shut between them, Sachiko's smile turned a touch bittersweet.

"Do call me tomorrow. We can make plans then," she said to Yumi. "And say thank you to Sei-sama for me."

Then the rubber edges of the glass doors joined in their own squeaky embrace, and the train began to march forward into the night.

* * *

Yumi peered through the windows of the two doors that separated her rail car from the next. A pair of clear, light-colored eyes looked back at her. There was no hesitation, no awkwardness—only a steady gaze that did not waver for even a second after they had noticed each other. As always, the woman's face looked hard to read, almost inorganic in its solidness, like it was carved out of pale stone.

She wasn't sure who had spotted whom first. Yumi, whose train car was mostly empty, hadn't thought to look around until she was a few minutes into the ride, until she had realized that she only had a vague idea of where she was supposed to go. As she had wandered over to a station map on the wall, her eyes had quickly caught sight of that living statue. The statue had then turned immediately towards her.

Yumi thought that maybe neither of them had noticed the other first. It was Sachiko-sama who must have seen Sei-sama on the platform before she had nudged Yumi onto the train. It was Sachiko-sama who had seen them both and pushed them together.

Yumi couldn't help but be surprised by this realization. How had Sachiko known what Yumi wanted before Yumi had even thought of it herself?

Well, they were _soeurs_ after all.

Satou Sei remained on the other side of the doors, unmoving. Though there were plenty of seats, she stood, staring at Yumi curiously, almost as one did towards an attractive stranger. Her right hand was wrapped around a grip bar overhead and her body seemed to hang from it loosely, lazily. In her other hand, a small school bag swung from side to side with the movements of the train. It was the only point on Sei's body that seemed a little tense; her knuckles were flexing noticeably against the handle of the bag.

 _Why won't she come?_ Yumi thought. It was rather strange. Sei was normally the one to sneak up on Yumi, to come up behind her before Yumi had even realized what was happening, to wrap her in a half-platonic, half-romantic, fully-shameless embrace.

Sei continued to simply look, her expression blank. Perhaps the emptiness was expectation; perhaps it was Yumi's turn to fill the space between them.

So she walked up to the juncture between the two cars and ran her hand against the button on the wall. The pair of doors between them swished open with a hiss. The two cars were held together at a joint, and Yumi almost stumbled as the train edged around a wide corner and the cars shifted, dancing coyly with each other.

When she managed to grab onto the inside wall and steady herself, she looked up to see that she was standing less than a meter from where Satou Sei regarded her with a questioning expression.

"You surprised me, Yumi-chan," she said. "It's not very often that you find me first." Her face broke into a smile.

Yumi smiled back. "Lately I've been finding you a lot, Sei-sama."

"That's true." Sei said nothing more after that, but she seemed like she was about to take a step towards Yumi. As she shifted her weight, the bag at her side bounced against her leg. For some strange reason, this made her look down quickly, a wince briefly flashing over her face, and then she leaned back and stood as she had before. The smile faded somewhat.

"What are you up to tonight, Sei-sama?" Yumi asked. "It's a bit late to be going home, isn't it?"

Sei replied with some amusement in her tone: "And what are _you_ doing here, Yumi-chan? I thought you lived a bit further up the line. Actually, don't you usually take the bus home, anyway?"

"I was on my way to visit a friend's place." Yumi paused, watching Sei's expression carefully. "But now I don't think she's home."

"Oh?" But Sei seemed to get the point. Her smile widened into a small grin. "Inviting yourself over, I see. How presumptuous. Imagine what people would say if they knew a Lillian graduate could be so ill-mannered."

"Not only that, but I couldn't remember exactly where you had told me you lived, so I'm glad that I ran into you. This way I can invite myself over properly." Even though Yumi was throwing Sei an insolent smile, tipping her chin up towards Sei in a way that was completely improper when addressing a superior, there was a blush rising in her cheeks. She knew that it betrayed her still lingering lack of confidence. She also knew that Sei didn't care.

"I am going to your apartment tonight," Yumi declared. Somehow, she had managed to pronounce the words without stuttering.

"Is that so?" Sei asked her without any inflection that suggested a question. She finally took half a step towards Yumi and appeared to search her face for something. They stood close to each other, their eyes locked, the intimacy of their shared gaze unmistakably that of a pair of lovers. Yumi wondered if this was the sort of stare the preceded a kiss; at the same time, Sei's look came off as a slight bit aggressive, as if she were crouched over Yumi and poised to lash out at her.

Yumi opened herself up to it. She had no intention of resisting anything that Sei was about to do to her.

After a few seconds, though, nothing came of it. Yumi felt a bit self-conscious standing there all of a sudden, knowing that others outside of the empty car might be able to see, and that it was plainly obvious what was going on between them.

Still, she was satisfied on one level. She had finally been able grasp something about the connection that she had with Sei, something that was missing from what she had with most other people—including with Sachiko. There was a strange sort of violence between her and Sei that flavored their relationship. It expressed itself as an occasional sensation of pushing and pulling, this vague desire to have Sei manhandle her, then an odd feeling that she wanted to dig her nails into Sei's skin and fight her off. She had never felt anything like that with anyone else.

 _Things are different with her._

But what was it, exactly? They loved each other, of course, but there was something else there, an edge that had always made Yumi a bit cautious.

 _I want to have sex with Sei-sama. That's why it's different._

The thought came to her mind before she could attempt to suppress it. When she let the thought arise without resistance, though, she realized that it was stupid to run away from it. After all, why else had she decided to follow Sei home? Of course she wanted her. If it wasn't for the fact that Sei was a master in the subtle art of creating just the right amount of distance at just the right time, they would have crossed that line long ago.

If Sei had only asked, she would have said yes—maybe not during the first year that they had known each other, but not long after that she could have been easily convinced at any time. But Sei was never going to ask.

It was yet another odd moment of clarity. It was like what she had felt at the arcade, an instance where the world seemed to become slow and vivid.

Sei appeared to sense the shift in the air as well. She gazed at Yumi curiously. "You look...older tonight," she said. "Different. There's something different."

"I spoke to Onee-sama earlier," Yumi murmured, and finally she broke the stare, looking out at the world that quickly passed beside them.

Sei nodded. Yumi could see the outline of her reflection in the window. "I knew you had the courage, Yumi. I knew you would face her on your own eventually."

Yumi laughed sardonically. "Actually, she came up to me. I didn't have the energy to run away."

"When you're avoiding someone, you always have the energy to run, Yumi-chan; I've seen it," Sei said to her, grinning proudly. "I think you're more grown up than you think. You faced one of your greatest fears, and that deserves some praise. Give yourself more credit."

"Maybe some of that's true," Yumi said, looking back at Sei. "I did face a fear. I was always too scared to examine my relationship with Onee-sama closely. I was afraid it would...disappear if I looked directly at it, I think. Maybe like a mirage? I felt like, if we risked shaking the foundation of what it meant to be _soeurs_ , then the idea of the whole _soeur_ system would break down somehow...and a part of me would die with it—a part of her, too. I know it sounds dumb saying it out loud like this now."

Sei shook her head. "No, I understand."

Yumi smiled at her quietly for a moment, but then she let her face fall into a mock frown. "It wasn't all me, though. I know that you helped. Don't try to deny it. Onee-sama told me." It didn't actually bother her, though. In fact, as soon as Yumi had realized that Satou Sei's magic had been involved in the night's unfolding, Yumi's desire to see her had sparked with an unusual fervor—enough that even Sachiko had apparently sensed it.

"That's besides the point, isn't it?" Sei said with a chuckle. "But you're right. I'm sorry. I accidentally meddled in your affairs, and I'm not very good at it—unlike you experts from the Rosa Chinensis tribe. It was an amateur's mistake that you found out I was here."

"You leave traces everywhere, Sei-sama...or maybe I just know where to find the signs of your presence." Yumi lifted her hand to rub the side of her own arm bashfully. It hadn't been her intention to be so openly flirtatious, but then again, she was on a confidence streak that night, and she was ready to ride the wave until the end.

She wasn't yet sure what that end _was_ exactly. Still, she wondered what kind of neighborhood Sei lived in, what her apartment looked like, what type of bedsheets she owned.

Sei had closed her eyes momentarily. Her fist seemed to grow tighter against the handle of the bag in her hand.

"That isn't yours, is it?" Yumi finally asked.

Sei opened her eyes. "No."

"It's Alice's, isn't it? I've seen her carrying it around before."

"You have a sharp eye, Yumi-chan." Sei smiled at her with approval—but then her face clouded over with something else. "Does it bother you?"

"Does what bother me?" Yumi said, but of course she already knew exactly what Sei was asking.

"That I'm with Alice—that I _was_ with Alice, rather."

"Did something happen?" Yumi decided that this was better than answering, because the truth was that she didn't yet know how she felt about Sei and Alice being together.

"We, uh…." A tinge of pink actually showed up on Sei's face. It was barely noticeable, but it was enough to make Yumi stare at her in surprise.

"So _that_ happened," Yumi muttered before she could censor herself. She looked away, a bit embarrassed. She knew that it was no threat to what she had with Sei—she could never imagine being possessive of her the way she had been with Sachiko; even just the thought was laughable—but she would be lying if she told herself that it didn't make her feel a bit uncomfortable to learn this piece of information.

Especially since she was on a train headed for Sei's apartment in the middle of the night with not exactly the most innocent of intentions herself. Wouldn't it be weird to sleep with Sei immediately after Sei had been with another girl? Should she ask her to shower first?

Yumi wanted to laugh. The situation was just so ridiculous. The most absurd part of it was that, no matter how much she examined herself for a trace of anger, for a trace of offendedness, she found absolutely none. Try as she might, she couldn't bring herself to be outraged or to feel any blow to her ego, even though some small, surface part of her felt like she should. It was only normal, right?

She couldn't even bring herself to find Sei's behavior unacceptable. Actually, to her mild horror, she discovered that it even made her feel a little more attracted to Sei if she was perfectly honest with herself.

Sei stared at her with a touch of worry. "No, we didn't do _that_." Then she paused. "Well, maybe we did. Maybe _she_ did. I don't really know, to be honest. It was all...over a lot faster than I'm used to. Actually, there were a lot of things about it that I wasn't used to. Maybe it was the same for her. I think I scared her." An uneasy look had returned to Sei's face. "She ran off. I didn't chase her."

When Yumi looked more closely at the bag in Sei's hand, she finally noticed that it wasn't zipped all the way. The tips of a pair of shoes poked out of the open space, and she thought that she could see some fabric crammed in there as well. They appeared to be male clothes.

"She ran off naked?" Yumi asked, totally confused.

Sei shook her head and let out a long sigh. "Maybe naked would have been better, considering what she was wearing."

"Why didn't you chase her, then?" She was asking earnestly.

Sei gave Yumi a strange look for a moment, but soon her expression softened into a pensive smile. "I've only ever chased one girl, Yumi-chan. Once was enough."

Yumi noticed the pain on Sei's face for the first time. She felt a little guilty suddenly. She had been so absorbed in her own newfound feelings, in the liberation that she felt after facing Sachiko, in the realization that she didn't have to confine her desires anymore, that she had missed that look of quiet suffering in Sei's eyes.

Without thinking, she reached out and covered Sei's left hand with her own. "I don't have to go home with you. If you'd rather be alone, I understand."

Sei studied her face for a long time—and then the bittersweet smile shifted into something else, something that Yumi once again could not read. "I've only ever chased one girl," Sei murmured again. She loosened her grip suddenly and the bag dropped with a thud against the floor of the train. She took Yumi's hand and brought it to her lips. "But you're not running, are you? In fact, you approached me bravely. So of course I'll give you what you want."

Before Yumi could react, Sei had pulled her by the arm and clasped her in a violent embrace. Yumi took a hard, sharp breath against Sei's chest, inhaling every trace of her essence, digging her fingers into the fabric of Sei's shirt. At first, she couldn't make sense of the feeling of overwhelming frustration that suddenly filled her; it was like she couldn't get close enough, couldn't press her body deeply enough against Sei's elegant frame.

But Sei seemed to know. She pulled back a bit, so that just the smallest crack of space grew between them. Then she leaned down and pressed her lips against Yumi's.

Yumi could hardly breathe. The feeling, the taste of Sei's slightly open mouth filled her with a sensation that both catered to some unspeakable hunger inside of her, and yet left her burning for something more, something deeper. She felt intense pleasure from the touch of Sei's soft skin, and at the same time felt annoyance that such a barrier as skin existed in the first place, when she wanted to be closer, when she wanted Sei to touch some place deep within her.

The nearly empty rail car barreled down the tracks. Inside, the ghostly silhouette of a couple locked in a kiss, their passion shamelessly open for the outside world to watch, sped along with the humming train.

* * *

 _A/N:_

 _Yep, s_ _o I updated the description, since I think we've moved far beyond "brief suggestions" of Sei/Yumi at this point, haha. Sometimes the characters just do what they want, even when you don't necessarily plan it. Thanks a lot for reading, and as always let me know what you think if you've made it this far!_


	9. Chapter 9: Both Sides of the Gate

**Chapter 9: Both Sides of the** **Gate**

As they walked through the opening of the building, for some reason the long breezeway reminded Yumi of a giant gullet. Maybe it was because most of the moonlight was concentrated near the entrance, and the small white lights on the ceiling barely lit the rest of the corridor. It looked like a stretching throat that grew darker and darker, leading all the way down to God-knows-where.

She couldn't shake the feeling that she was about to be sucked into that emptiness. She didn't mind it, though. In a way, the sensation seduced her. Maybe the beast that would be eating her wasn't part of the building; maybe it was the lanky woman who was slowing easing down the dimly-lit walkway in front of her.

Of course, Yumi had followed her. Perhaps this time it was Yumi who had become the beast.

She looked from side to side as they wandered down the aisle of bland gray doors, their footfalls making the concrete vibrate with disproportionate echoes. It made her want to start tiptoeing. There was still a side of her that was deathly nervous of getting caught.

 _Caught doing what?_ she asked herself.

They weren't doing anything wrong—not yet, anyway—and it wasn't like anyone knew or cared about what they were going to be up to. Even when they had kissed on the empty train and Yumi had pushed Sei away after coming to her senses, no one in the other rail cars had seemed to notice their public display.

And since she had resisted, Sei hadn't tried to kiss her again. This had frustrated Yumi far more than she could have predicted. It was the first time anyone had ever kissed her like that—deeply, confidently, and without any pretenses about what it was supposed to mean. The moment they had broken contact, she had immediately resented that it was over.

She wanted more. This, too, she found troubling, though. The sudden feeling of raw need worried her, as did the amount of impatience that she had when Sei stopped by a random door and began fiddling with the lock at a leisurely pace. She found herself wishing that there was no door, just as she had wished that the train ride hadn't been so long—just as she had wished that she hadn't waited years to kiss Satou Sei.

"Sei-sama," she blurted out in a sharp whisper. Her voice reverberated lightly through the breezeway. She had meant to hurry Sei, but knowing that this would be extremely ill-mannered and desperate, she hadn't committed to any urgency in her tone, and it came out sounding flat instead.

Sei very slowly turned to face her, her hand still gripping the doorknob. "What?" Sei asked. Yumi couldn't tell if she was playing dumb or not.

"Let's go inside already. It's...cold out here," Yumi mumbled.

Sei looked at her strangely. "No it isn't. It's not cold at all." Then a teasing smile spread across her face and it made Yumi want to reach out and smack her arm.

Before that could happen, though, Sei leaned her weight into the door and pulled the handle clockwise. The barrier opened by a crack. The hinges squeaked. After what seemed like forever, Yumi could see a small, dark apartment spreading before her. It was filled with the ghosts of small bits of furniture, but she couldn't see the layout very clearly until Sei stepped towards a wall and slapped the lights on.

"Come on in," Sei said, dropping her baggage near the entrance and kicking off her shoes. She looked at Yumi, and somehow didn't seem at all impatient. She held open the door in silence, even as Yumi suddenly felt an itch of hesitation.

This would change something, wouldn't it? She had the vague sense that the moment she stepped over the threshold, she would be swallowed up into Sei's apartment and undergo some transformation in there. The next day, or later that night, or whenever they were destined to part again, Yumi was bound to be different than she was now.

Sure, there were some things that even Sei could not change about her, but the thought that something in her was about to crumble away—about to die—filled the back of her mind with some residual fear. It was not unlike the hesitation she had felt in facing her Onee-sama, in looking squarely at the truth that they had never been merely _soeurs_ , that maybe even the entire idea of _soeurs_ had just been a story they had told themselves.

She felt like she was about to uncover another truth in there, beyond the door frame.

"You're not afraid of me, are you, Yumi-chan?" Sei asked. There was a smirk on her face.

Yumi, who had clasped her hands together and was peering cautiously into the room, met Sei's gaze directly. "Yes," she admitted, "I'm afraid of you, Sei-sama."

And then she crossed over.

While Yumi slipped off her shoes just inside the apartment, Sei pushed the door shut with one hand. The lock made an audible click. It was a sound that seemed to carry a heavy finality to Yumi.

They were both inside together now. Alone.

Yumi stood up straight after discarding her shoes, her heart thumping so wildly in her ribcage that she wondered if Sei could sense it as well. When she looked up, she saw that Sei was staring at her body quite openly.

"You _do_ look older," Sei murmured. "Something about the way you hold yourself is different. I like it."

Yumi blushed and crossed her arms, feeling a bit self-conscious, especially with how shamelessly Sei's eyes had settled on her chest. Still, she wanted Sei to kiss her again, so she took a single cautious step towards her.

Sei didn't move, only watched. "What do you want, Yumi?" she asked in an oddly gruff voice.

Yumi's breath hitched. Such an obvious question was a little unexpected. She averted her eyes, but found that her gaze was automatically traveling over to the Western-style bed that sat across the room from them. "I don't want anything," she whispered.

"Bullshit. You came here for a reason. Say it."

Yumi stared at her, taken off guard. _This is why I'm afraid of you, Sei-sama,_ she thought.

This time it was Sei who took a step towards her. "I want to hear you say it," she said. "I don't want to pretend later that this was accidental, or that we got carried away. You came here on purpose, and what we're about to do is on purpose."

Yumi could feel the heat from Sei's body radiating and it made her legs become suddenly weak. Her body grew even more tense with arousal; she wanted to rush towards Sei and make the burning need inside of her perfectly clear.

It was strange: years ago, what Sei was saying might have paralyzed her, might have made her unable to go on. Examining the obvious a little too closely had a way of shutting it down. Pointing to those feelings so directly tended to take away the mystery and the magic, the ambiguity of it all—the safety.

Except that Sei seemed to have her own magic, a new kind that Yumi hadn't grown used to just yet, a kind that was all about exposing her and forcing her into a state of nakedness. Sei was taking a huge risk that she might scare Yumi off—and yet she didn't seem to care if she did.

This only made Yumi want it more. "I'd like...to spend the night here. With you," she said. It took a lot more energy than she thought it would to force that out. Inviting herself over was one thing, but facing the vulnerability of actually asking for what she wanted was something else entirely.

Sei took another small step forward, then another. Yumi could smell her unique scent very clearly now; it started to fill the air around her. They were standing only centimeters away from each other, and Sei was looking at her with very deliberate intention. It made Yumi feel a bit uncomfortable; a bit like she was being exposed by a huge spotlight.

Then Sei grabbed her by the collar of her shirt and jerked her upwards. Their lips met. She felt Sei's teeth scrape lightly against her mouth. She felt a heat smoldering deep in her belly, one that began to rush quickly downwards as soon as they had touched.

Sei kissed her violently and held her with no trace of tenderness, and her collar began to dig uncomfortably into the back of her neck. A jolt of energy shot through Yumi's body. She kissed Sei back, just as violently, but she found herself pounding her fist hard against Sei's sternum at the same time. It made an audible thud and Sei let her go at once.

Yumi looked up at her, eyes wide, breath coming in gasps, the back of her hand pressed to her now swollen lips. "That's...too much," Yumi said. She missed the contact immediately, though, and began moving towards Sei again.

This time Sei pushed her back, gently enough that it didn't hurt her, but hard enough that she stumbled further into the room and nearly tripped on the nearby low table. Sei leaned over her, grinning wickedly. For some reason, this filled Yumi with an odd sensation that she couldn't really understand—something heavily made up of arousal, but tinged with the sharpness of rage.

She smacked both hands hard against Sei's shoulders and forced her back, trying to equal the force of Sei's earlier blow. She was even more irritated when she found that Sei had hardly been thrown off. In fact, Sei reached out and pushed her again.

Yumi almost fell that time, and with a loud grunt of frustration, she rammed the palms of her hands against Sei's upper chest. Again, Sei only paused and took half a step back, but seemed otherwise unaffected. Sei started to laugh. When she pushed Yumi a final time, Yumi felt the back of her legs bump against the edge of a wooden bed frame.

She was cornered against the mattress, but somehow she had managed to stay standing. "What are you doing, Sei?" Yumi asked, out of breath, her body buzzing with overwhelming fear—and a deep, pulsing excitement more intense than any she had ever felt before. It was only a few seconds later that she realized she had dropped the honorific from Sei's name.

"What are _you_ doing, Yumi?" Sei responded in kind. The supremely irritating grin was still there. "Go ahead and run. I'll chase you around the room if you want. Do you need to be tired out first?"

" _Shut up,_ " Yumi said. "Just shut up."

Sei looked genuinely bewildered for a moment, though her amusement hadn't faded. "What's wrong, Yumi-chan? You look a little scary like that. Is it me who should be running, then?"

"God, just _please_ _stop talking_ and…"

Then Yumi said it. She said it plainly, in all its uncensored glory, through gritted teeth. She couldn't remember ever having pronounced the phrase before in her life—and it made her blush immediately—but it had come out of her mouth like a reflex.

Because she meant it.

Sei had the decency to be taken aback. She stared at Yumi, her own arousal suddenly much more obvious. "If that's what you want," she whispered, after she had recovered from the mild shock. She stepped forward until her body was pressed against Yumi's, until Yumi could feel Sei's heart racing along with her own.

Thankfully, Sei appeared to be done forcing her into emotional nakedness, and was suddenly more interested in Yumi's physical body. Without any preamble, she grasped the bottom hem of Yumi's shirt and yanked it upwards, so that most of her torso and chest were exposed. She pressed her mouth to the small swell of flesh just above the cup of Yumi's bra.

Yumi gasped. She felt heat radiate from that spot, and it was from more than just Sei's breath. Before she could even think it through, she grabbed Sei's hand and pressed it hard to the other side of her chest.

When Sei leaned over and kissed her, all of her thoughts seemed to evaporate. She opened her mouth immediately. She let Sei slip a thigh between her legs with no resistance at all. All of the tenseness had left her body.

She had surrendered again.

* * *

" _Yumi_."

It was the first time Sei had spoken in a long while, since she had freed Yumi of her clothes. The touch of Sei's bare skin felt oddly natural to Yumi now, like it had always been there, gliding against her body and stoking her desire.

It took Yumi a moment to recognize her own name. It sounded like a collection of meaningless syllables initially, little more than a ragged sigh coming out of Sei's mouth. In the same way, the room became hazy before Yumi's eyes, as if all of the furniture flowed together, as if all boundaries had begun to break down.

She even felt like she herself was melting into all of it—into the bedsheets, into the mattress, into Sei.

She couldn't understand what she was feeling. It had been painful at first, and then pleasurable, and then painful again, and then so pleasurable that she had thought she would go insane. Both of these extremes had danced together until they pushed her beyond a point where neither seemed to exist. She felt like she was being cracked open.

Her mind went blank. She cried out. She pushed back against Sei and dug her fingernails into the muscles of Sei's shoulders. Her body helplessly spasmed and she could do nothing but tense herself against the rolling waves of pleasure-pain that suddenly exploded within her.

Sei didn't stop. She crashed into Yumi in time with each pulse. It made Yumi want to pull her close and slap her away at the same time. Instead, as the intense feeling died down within mere seconds and the pain began to overwhelm the rest of the sensation, she reached up and pressed her hand to Sei's face. Gasping, she pushed her away.

At some point—she could not tell when, since she had lost all sense of time—Sei fell heavily beside her. At some point, Yumi crawled onto Sei and buried her face into her naked chest. There was a long moment of complete emptiness, a stillness in the room, the quality of an echo without any sound.

Except that Yumi could hear Sei's heart beating. Inside her own self, though, only a ringing hollowness emerged.

She pressed her face hard against Sei's chest, and then her body exploded into sobs.

"Yumi-chan…."

There was alarm in Sei's voice, but Yumi couldn't stop. She watched her own tears marking transparent paths down the line of Sei's ribs. She grasped violently at Sei's skin with her hands, the tips of her fingers making red, angry indentations into the flesh.

But Sei didn't flinch. She did nothing.

The sobs kept coming, pushing through Yumi in succession, as if there were something inside her body that was trying to burst out. It felt like she would purge at any moment, and the thought of that terrified her. She swallowed against the churning sensation in her stomach.

"It hurts," she groaned into Sei's skin. She felt the vibrations of her voice and of her sobs ringing against the older woman's bones. She squeezed her eyes shut and cried for a long time.

Then, slowly, the feeling faded. It came and passed just as her climax had, like a counterpoint to the bliss of moments before. When the shudders had died down, she wasn't sure what to do. The inside of her mouth felt salty from the tears that had rolled in past her lips.

"I'm sorry," Yumi whispered eventually.

It took Sei a moment to answer, but her body soon rumbled with a hoarse response: "Don't apologize. I shouldn't have been so rough. I hurt you."

"No," Yumi said. She pressed a hand to the wet spot on Sei's stomach where her tears had collected. "It's not that. Yes, you did hurt me there—but most of it is...a different kind of hurt. It hurts more than just in my body. But it feels good, too. I can't explain it."

Sei paused again for a short while. "It was the first time for you, wasn't it? Sometimes the first time hurts."

Yumi lifted her head slowly from its place on Sei's sternum. Though it felt extremely heavy for some reason, she managed to sit up. She covered her face with her hands. "Was it like this for you the first time?" Yumi asked. She glanced quickly at Sei's face through the cracks between her fingers, but turned away when she saw that Sei was staring at her directly.

"No," Sei replied. "It was different for me." Another pause. "I didn't sleep with someone I was in love with."

A weird feeling came over Yumi. It was yet another sensation of both attraction and revulsion towards Sei, a feeling that made her want to scream into Sei's face.

 _I'm not in love!_ Yumi cried out in her own mind. _I'm not in love. Not with such an aloof, unconcerned, unholy person. Not if I know what's good for me._

But of course she was, so her internal battle died down rather quickly. These were the last vestiges of her resistance. She sighed and let her hands slip from her face, and she finally met Sei's gaze with her swollen eyes.

When Sei grabbed her arm and pulled her closer, Yumi didn't fight it. She accepted a light kiss and relaxed into the embrace, feeling oddly safe, and at the same time even more exposed and vulnerable than she had before. She could feel Sei's hips pressing against hers—whether deliberately or not, she couldn't tell—and it awakened another small wave of arousal in her.

"Sei."

The intimacy of whispering Sei's bare first name left an odd sensation in her mouth. Still, she knew that soon enough she would be tasting deeper things.

* * *

Alice knew that long ago, all of those crisscrossing rods of iron had belonged inside the earth and had once looked very different. For millions of years, they had waited as ore to be ripped out of the ground and melted and poured into the kind of mould that would serve a purpose for society. Without the guiding walls of the mould, the iron would be useless. What nature had made on its own was useless.

And the iron gate in front of her was very useful. The idea of a gate was that it could open only for certain people, that you could use it to pick and choose who belonged inside.

She stood outside now. The wind huffed against her, reminding her every few seconds of the billowing skirt around her waist. She stared between the bars of the gate and followed the garden path with her eyes. The front door was closed and the window above it was blacked out.

She hoped to God that they had all gone to sleep. Maybe the uniform had made her more religious suddenly, but for a moment she wished that the statue of Venus that her mother kept near the roses had instead been of Maria-sama.

Her feet hurt badly enough that she hesitated at the thought of crunching her way through that garden, feeling blades of grass poking her through her now ripped socks. It's funny that she hadn't really noticed that part while she was dashing through the streets. In was only now, as she looked hard towards he final steps of her journey, that the blisters at the soles of her feet became intolerable.

She hadn't been thinking of anything as she ran, until she ended up here. She hadn't even thought to find herself some decent clothes, though her wallet had been left behind in the pocket of her trousers along with all of her money, so she had no idea how she could have pulled that off either. All she had in the world were the clothes on her back.

She pressed her code into the gate lock. She felt like an impostor, like someone who had looked over the homeowner's shoulder the day before, memorized the numbers, and was now breaking through the gate with criminal audacity.

Still, the gates seemed to believe that it was her. She had fooled them well enough that they opened into a creaky yawn, as if they were offering her a sleepy embrace. She walked through, and was careful to lower her feet exactly onto the concrete stepping stones that her mother had laid out in the garden.

When she reached the door, she very slowly put in the key and very slowly turned the lock. Once the door was open by a small enough crack that she could slip through without much commotion, she made her way inside as silently as a thief in the night.

She felt relieved to find that all of the lights were off except for a small table lamp near the couch. She winced and peeled off her socks while she stood at the foyer, then made her way across the living room and over to the stairs.

It had never occurred to her before how loud the stairs actually were until that moment. In the dead silence of the house, she could hear every little creak and feel every little vibration against her bare feet. She tried to tiptoe her way up, but it didn't seem to help much. Before long, though, she could see the door to her room—the door to safety, for the moment.

Then she noticed that there was light shining out from between the cracks. Her heart felt like it had paused along with her steps. An entirely unhelpful shiver passed through her.

 _No. No one is in there,_ she reminded herself. _I_ _forgot to turn the light off_ _earlier. I was in such a rush to get out that I barely_ _even_ _closed the door after me._

She let out a sigh—to convince herself that she was relaxed more than for any other reason—and pushed herself across those last few paces until she could reach out and grasp the doorknob.

But as she began turning, her hand seemed to twist on its own.

 _Oh no. God, no._

And the door burst open. The sound that it made when it hit the other side of the wall may as well have been a gunshot, it seemed so impossibly loud to her.

There was her mother. She stood on the opposite end of the door frame, a glow of yellow, diffused light coming from behind her so that her features were momentarily obscured in the shadows. As Alice's eyes adjusted, though, and she could make out her expression, she wished that she couldn't see at all. Her body reacted on its own and made a move to run away, but her mother stopped her.

She reached out and grabbed Alice by the wrist, yanking her into the room where the light could further expose the situation. She stared at Alice with a look of shock at first, seemingly at a complete loss for words.

"Where...have you been?" she said finally, when she appeared to regain her ability to form words. "Wearing _that_?" That last part, she had almost shrieked, but something—perhaps the knowledge that Alice's father was asleep in another room—kept her a bit subdued.

Alice felt her stomach drop. She didn't know what to say—she _couldn't_ say anything. She wanted to vomit.

Before Alice could offer even the semblance of an explanation, though, her mother shut the door and pushed her further into the room. "We house you, we feed you, we invest so much of our lives in you. We pay for your education—and _this_ is how you repay us?" Her mother's voice was rising, and Alice could see that her teeth were smashed tightly together as she spoke. When Alice took a step back, her mother took a step forward. "Who do you think you are, Kintarou? What kind of world do you think you're living in?"

She reached out and gabbed a fistful of Alice's sailor collar, then tugged it with an angry amount of strength. It made Alice stumble forward and it made her shoulder pop out of the neck of the dress.

"Stop!" Alice cried. She snatched the end of the scarf from her mother's hand. "You'll break it," she added in a more timid voice. "It's not mine."

" _Obviously,_ " her mother said. "This is the Lillian Academy uniform, isn't it? That half-foreigner who's been tutoring you gave you this, didn't she? It baffles my mind how a prestigious school like Lillian could tolerate a crazed weirdo such as her."

Alice felt her jaw tighten. "Don't say things like that about Satou-san! She's a kind, talented student!"

But her mother ignored her protests. "She can practice all the strange customs that she wants in her personal life, but she's not going to tarnish the good name of a local school and turn my son into a...pervert—not if I have anything to do with it!" She balled her hands into a pair of fists. "She's absolutely fired. I don't care what your father has to say about it. You are never going to see her again—and I'm reporting what she did to her school."

"You can't do that!" Alice shouted. For the first time, she surged forward in anger, but her mother stopped her with a sharp tap to the face. Alice pulled back and covered her face with her hands. As much as she tried hard to suppress them, the tears immediately began to flow.

"Stop crying and look at what you're becoming, Kintarou." Her mother's voice was full of disgust. "Do you really want to live like this? Do you want this to be your future? Get out of those clothes."

Alice reached down and grasped the collar of her dress tightly in her hand. The sobs still shook her body. "I...I didn't want to disappoint you, Mother, but I can't—"

"You _can_ , Kintarou. I know you can. I do trust you, even if it seems that I don't. You're a smart boy, so I know you can do the right thing." Her mother's voice had softened, and Alice couldn't help but feel a sudden glimmer of hope, a feeling that there would be some way to get to the other side of this humiliating experience. "You stopped all of these...weird behaviors this entire past year, didn't you? I never found even a single tube of lipstick in your room. It was only after that queer tutor of yours influenced you, wasn't it? If you stop seeing her, then everything will be back to normal. You had stopped dressing like this before, right? When we had all agreed that it wasn't good for you?"

Alice felt her breathing cut out. Even with the ache in her chest, she still managed to close her eyes and nod. Every time she did it, it became easier to lie.

"For instance," her mother continued slowly, "if I were to look inside your closet right now, I wouldn't find any other women's clothes, would I?"

"N-no, Mother." Alice had not kept any of her women's clothes at the house for a long time. Even the few times that she had dared dress outside the house after graduating high school, she had merely bought a cheap outfit, stashed her regular clothes in a public locker after changing, and then discarded the female clothes after changing back at the end of the day.

"I'm glad." Her mother started to walk towards the entrance of the room, the anger on her face still quite evident, but her body looking slightly less tense. Alice let out the breath that she was holding and could finally feel a slight bit of relief. Perhaps the situation was salvageable in some way after all.

But then her mother suddenly turned on her heel and began walking quickly back into the room, her feet thudding loudly with the urgency of her movements. She ripped open the closet doors before Alice could say anything to stop her.

The wardrobe was filled with Alice's regular male outfits—"Kintarou's" clothes—and a row of innocuous casual shoes underneath. Alice's mother let out a long breath and the tension finally seemed to completely leave her body. "I'm sorry, Kintarou," she said. "I just had to be sure. I'm not trying to bully you, or to make you feel like I don't trust you, but considering your history, I—"

Something seemed to catch her eye. She turned her head. Alice followed the direction of her gaze deep into the edge of the closet, in the far left corner, where just a tiny tuft of light blue fabric stuck out from between a few winter coats.

 _What? Why is she—?_

Suddenly, her brain made the connection. She had forgotten all about it somehow. It was the one thing that she hadn't had the heart to throw away that night, weeks ago. Against her better judgment, she had brought it home and stashed it somewhere out of sight.

Alice bit her lip and suppressed a groan. Her insides felt like they were being twisted into a knot. Maybe she was mistaken, and her mother hadn't seen it.

Her mother walked towards the corner of the wardrobe, picked up the bit of fabric that seemed out of place, then pulled it out to reveal half of a knitted sleeve. Her eyebrows knotted. She yanked the rest of it hard, pulling it clean off its hanger and out of the closet.

"Mother, don't—!" Alice cried.

Still, her mother ignored her. She only stared at the sweater in her hand, her breaths heaving out violently through her nostrils. "What...is this?"

Why, it was the sweater that Sei had given to Alice the first night they met—a sweater that smelled a bit funny, a bit like old spare tires in the back of a car, but which nonetheless carried the lingering undertone of Sei's scent. Occasionally, Alice would take it out of the closet and press her face to it, but she had always been careful to quickly stuff it back underneath the heavy coats afterwards.

Even though it was clearly too big for her—having suited Sei's lanky frame much better—it was also very clearly a woman's sweater.

Alice's mother tightened her fist around the fabric. "I wish you hadn't lied to me," she said, her voice eerily flat. "I wish we could go back to the way things were, to before you had shown me that we very obviously need to do something drastic. I'm sorry, Kintarou—but your father and I won't fail you again."

This time, when she turned and walked towards the front door of the room, she did not hesitate to leave, the sweater still clasped in her hand. A rushing puff of air came in as the door flew open, and the gust hit Alice directly in the face.

* * *

 _A/N:_

 _Hello there! Thanks for reading._

 _This was probably one of the hardest chapters to write, and I found myself cutting out a lot of content before settling on the final basic shape of this chapter. Maybe it was the subject matter, which is a bit hard to tastefully convey. Hopefully I managed to do that to some degree._

 _Next chapter coming soon...probably._


	10. Chapter 10: The Long-Awaited Sunrise

**Chapter 10: The Long-Awaited Sunrise**

The hallway outside of Sei's apartment looked totally different during the day. It almost seemed to Yumi like she was stepping out into a separate world from the one she had left behind the night before. The sun washed the corridor in white light, and she could see trees and grass and spreading landscapes on both ends of the building.

Yumi's intuition had been correct that moment before she had passed the threshold in the wee hours of the night: Things were different now—but it wasn't the world outside that had changed. _She_ had changed.

While they were descending the stairs on one side of the breezeway, Sei unexpectedly grasped Yumi's fingers with her free hand. In her other hand, Alice's bag had made a reappearance. Yumi stared at it for a moment as it bounced off Sei's leg with every heavy step down the stairs. After a moment, Yumi shook her head and readjusted their hands so that their palms were comfortably pressed together.

Sei smiled down at her, but said nothing.

It was when they had reached the sidewalk and started heading in the direction of the station that Yumi finally broke the pleasant silence that had been following them around that morning.

"Who was she?" Yumi asked. She wondered if it would seem out of the blue—or even petty, perhaps—but it had been bothering her ever since the night before. It was a thought that seemed to have wormed its way inside her brain and was unwilling to let go. _Even if it is none of my business,_ she thought.

Sei took a few more steps without saying anything, then seemed to suddenly notice that Yumi had spoken. "Mm?"

Yumi sighed a little. "Last night, you said...that the first time you slept with someone, you hadn't been in love with her." _Or him?_ Yumi thought, though she was pretty sure Sei had never been interested in a man in her life.

"Ohhh, right," Sei murmured. She kept walking, and said nothing else. There was no sign of irritation on Sei's face and she carried the same pleasant smile she had worn all morning, but there was also no sign that she intended on answering the question.

After a minute or two, though, she did. "Kanina Shizuka." She said it so casually that Yumi almost couldn't be shocked.

 _Almost._ Yumi looked up at Sei with confusion. "Ka— _Rosa Canina?_ "

"Yep." Sei's feet crunched on some gravel as she eased off the main walkway for a moment to sidestep a sleeping cat. Since their hands were joined, she tugged Yumi along with her.

Yumi didn't want to disturb the warm mood between them, but her curiosity was even more piqued than before. "While you were still in high school?" she found herself asking.

"No, no, I had already graduated. It was during a trip to Rome I took about two years ago with Katou. I snuck off and met with Shizuka in secret."

"You know, my class took a trip to Italy around that time. I even met with Shizuka-sama and she seemed very—" Yumi paused. "Oh."

"Yep." Sei gave Yumi half a smirk. "And there were maybe four or five others after her, if you were trying to ask about my...history."

In spite of her mild embarrassment, Yumi still managed to tease her: "Sheesh. How am I supposed to feel special now, Sei-sama?"

Sei looked at her with a serious expression all of a sudden. They had stopped in front of a crosswalk and Sei let go of her hand to press the button. "I don't know," she said. "That's not really up to me, is it, Yumi-chan?"

It took Yumi a moment to realize that Sei was gently scolding her. She averted her gaze until she felt Sei's hand rejoin hers, then they made their way to the other side of the street. When she looked back up at her, the silly grin had returned.

"The important thing is that we shared a lot of interesting moments last night," Sei told her. "You can come over again if you want."

Yumi tilted her head in a bit of confusion, but smiled back at her nonetheless. "'Interesting.' Is that what you call it? If you're trying to make me avoid you, it's almost working." Though she knew that there was very little Sei could do at this point to keep her away.

Indeed, the night had been "interesting." Yumi had found that once all of her pent up emotions and desires towards Sei had been unleashed, she had not been easily satisfied, so Sei had indulged her many times over the course of the evening and into the early morning. Sei had been very good at that—surprisingly good. Good enough that Yumi wasn't quite sure that she could deny Sei's invitation, even if she didn't want to seem too eager.

"I'd take you out to breakfast like a true gentleman, but there's something I really need to do before my morning classes," Sei said as they passed a French cafe on the street corner. Yumi hadn't realized that her mouth was watering at the smell of freshly baked bread until Sei mentioned it. "How about we have lunch together instead?"

Yumi shook her head. "I can't see you for the rest of the day, Sei-sama. After I've had some time to overthink everything that happened yesterday, I'll be too embarrassed to look at you. I should be okay by tomorrow, though." She was only half-joking.

Still, Sei laughed out loud. "Ah, Yumi-chan, that's very mature of you! Only the most self-aware people can plan their neurosis ahead of time." She paused. Her smile was warm. "I love you, Yumi-chan."

Yumi pressed the side of her face to Sei's shoulder. "I know," she said. Then her eyes traveled down to the bag in Sei's hand. She took a long, deep breath. "Is that what you need to do this morning?"

Sei followed the direction of her gaze, and her smile faded somewhat. "Yeah."

"You need to talk to her, Sei-sama. Don't just throw the bag over the fence and run away."

At this, Sei laughed again. "How do you know my plans so well? Get out of my head."

"I'm serious," Yumi said. She clenched Sei's hand a little tighter, a strange sensation welling up in her chest. "I can tell that...you really like her. You like her enough that you're willing to overlook her body, and I can't even imagine doing that for someone myself, to be honest. If it means anything to you, I think you and Alice would be good together."

Sei looked a bit surprised, but there was still amusement on her face. "You're telling me to pursue another woman after everything that happened last night? If I didn't know better, I would say you're trying to get rid of me." Unexpectedly, she leaned down and kissed Yumi lightly on the forehead, and somehow this made Yumi blush more than the rather adult kisses they had shared before they left the apartment. "Thankfully, I _do_ know better."

Yumi smiled, giving her a shrug in response. "I'm not trying to get rid of you...yet."

"Hmm, then are you saying that you don't care if I'm with both you and Alice?" Sei was gazing directly into her eyes, and though most of her tone was teasing, there was an edge of genuine curiosity that Yumi was experienced enough to detect.

"No," Yumi said. "I'm only saying that your being with Alice has nothing to do with your being with me."

When Yumi thought about what she had just said, she realized that it simply echoed Sei's question. What _was_ she saying, then?

"Do you think it's possible to be in love and never view others as a threat? No jealousy? No desire to cling to the person?" Sei asked her, as if she could hear Yumi's thoughts.

"No," Yumi said again, "but I think that we're like that somehow anyway." She leaned closer against Sei as the train station came into view. "Why do you think that is, Sei-sama? I used to assume that only Maria-sama was capable of that kind of love."

"Maybe sometimes a miracle happens for us mere mortals," Sei replied, guiding her up the steps that led to the station platform. She looked down at Yumi with a strange smile. "And maybe Maria-sama is just a statue, so it's easy for her."

* * *

The dread was the most unexpected part for Sei. She never thought that she'd feel this much resistance in facing Alice, in dragging herself those last few steps to the front of the gated home, especially considering that it had taken a lot of willpower not to chase after her the night before.

It was different when Alice was in that house, though. The house seemed to transform Alice into another person—someone that Sei didn't particularly like.

Somehow, she still managed to force her way through the mental block and she only hesitated for a moment before pressing the button on the intercom.

At the very least, she needed to hear Alice's voice. She needed to know that the girl was okay.

"Good morning. This is Satouuuu," Sei called out in a ridiculously cheery way. It was all she could do to keep from letting the urgency show in her tone.

There was a long pause on the other end, but finally an unfamiliar female voice crackled through the speaker. "Satou Sei-san?"

"Correct, that would be me. I know that normally I only come on Mondays and Wednesdays, but last night—"

"Yes, we regret to inform Satou-san that her services will no longer be needed," the voice interrupted politely.

Sei stared at the intercom stupidly, as if she would be able to make out the face of the young-sounding woman on the other end. "Eh…." It took her a moment to think of a response. For some reason she hadn't really expected this complication. She cleared her throat, trying to muster up as much formality as she could. "If it is not a burden to the household, may I please briefly intrude and speak with Arisugawa-kun directly? Or perhaps Arisugawa-kun could kindly come to meet me out here?"

There was another pause before some static cracked once again from the other end. "If the Arisugawa household still owes Satou-san any outstanding payments, then if Satou-san would be so kind as to inform us of her address, the Arisugawa household will gladly make good with their promises."

"It's not about the money, I…." Sei tried to take a deep breath, but she nonetheless felt the muscles on the back of her shoulders begin contracting with tension. "I need to speak with Arisugawa-kun. I came to deliver Arisugawa-kun's book bag, which was left behind last night during our...studies."

"Arisugawa-sama would like to thank Satou-san for going out of her way," the voice said after a moment. "Please stand by and a servant will be down shortly to collect the bag."

"No." Sei leaned over the speaker, and her voice came out a touch more forcefully than she had intended. "No, I need to speak with Arisugawa-kun directly please."

There was yet another pause that seemed to go on forever. She could only imagine the unfortunate servant who had been assigned to relay this information back and forth like a game of Chinese Whispers.

"Alternatively," the speaker said—and this was the only moment where Sei could detect a small bit of informal emotion, something like a touch of frustration, "if it burdens Satou-san to wait for any representatives of the Arisugawa household to come down, then she may leave the baggage just outside the gate, and it shall be fetched later. That is all." A loud pop sounded on the other end as the woman hung up.

Sei's jaw tightened with increasing fury. She stabbed the intercom button again with her finger. "Alternatively," Sei said, in a tone which almost mocked that of the hapless servant, "the mother of the Arisugawa-sama household may also come down and speak to me herself if she has the decency to tell me to my face why she's holding that kid hostage. _That_ is all."

The pause wasn't quite so long this time. "Please stand by. Arisugawa-sama wishes to speak with Satou-san directly."

Sei stepped up to the gate, but the iron wall didn't move a single centimeter. Instead, after less than a minute's time, the front door of the house began to creak open. With a stern, overly confident walk, Alice's mother stepped out of the house and across the garden. The point of her high heels seemed to sink deeply into the dirt, and Sei couldn't help but wonder why she hadn't just walked across the driveway—then again, the garden was the fastest route to the gate, and the woman seemed unusually rushed.

"Good morning, Satou-san," she said without an ounce of cheer. When she reached the gate, she didn't bother opening it. She merely rudely reached through the widest gap in the bars and extended her hand. "You may give me the bag."

Sei narrowed her eyes. "Where is Alice?"

"Who on Earth are you talking about?" But her tone made it clear that she knew exactly who Sei was referring to.

"Where is she? Why won't she come down to speak with me?"

"Kintarou-kun is uninterested in seeing you."

"Is that so? Or is it simply that you won't allow her to?" Sei asked boldly, all of her earlier formality crumbling away. She looked directly into the elder Arisugawa's eyes.

"The reasons why Kintarou-kun does not wish to see you are frankly none of your business. Please leave and don't come back to this house. You may give the bag to me or you may leave it on the ground by the gate. It makes no difference. If it's money you want, I will pay you right now if you wish, but you must leave immediately after."

Upon hearing that, Sei began to reach into her pocket. She unzipped her small wallet and pulled out the large wad of cash that had been keeping it well-stuffed for the past few weeks. She had spent hardly any of it. She pressed the money hard into Arisugawa's open hand.

"Take it," Sei said. "I don't want your money. I didn't do a very good job, anyway. If you want to know the truth, I'm not even foreign—not even a little bit. As hard as it may be to believe, I'm one hundred percent Japanese."

Arisugawa furrowed her brow. "Then that makes your behavior even more inexcusable. You should know better, Satou."

Sei said nothing. She merely placed the bag on the ground, propped against the gate, if for no other reason than to make it slightly harder for the woman to get a hold of it. Before she turned to leave, she gave the woman another cold glance. "You can't keep me away from her forever," Sei told her.

"I will see to it that you won't even bump into each other accidentally in public, Satou."

Sei didn't respond and started making her way down the block, her face burning with anger. When she turned the corner, she fought the urge to bring her fist against the outer concrete wall of the property. She looked up over the barrier and towards the house, and she could see what appeared to be Alice's bedroom window just over a trellis covered in vines. Sei briefly imagined herself climbing it, but noticed quickly that the vines were covered in thorns.

 _It's always thorns,_ she thought. If it wasn't the roses that pricked her, then it was the vines. She stared into the window, but it seemed that the room was shrouded in darkness and she couldn't see a single thing inside.

After a moment, she began shuffling down the sidewalk. Her morning classes would be starting soon, even if she wasn't in the mood to pay any attention to any drawling lecture; she would have to figure out what to do later.

As she wandered down the path in a daze, vaguely heading in the direction of the bus station, a flash of red caught her eye. She turned and saw the car that was slowly creeping next to her before she noticed who was in it.

"What kind of over-compensating douche drives a car like this? He'd have to be—" But then her eyes met with the driver, and she wondered how she hadn't realized earlier. "Kashiwagi," she said. "What do you want?"

He waved at her happily through the open window. "Come now, Satou-san, is that any way to greet an old friend?" He was following along next to her at a walking pace, which Sei found amusing because she could only guess how frustrating that was for a speed demon like himself. "Why don't you hop in and I'll give you a lift to wherever you're going?"

"No thanks," she said. "I'd rather walk."

He lowered his sunglasses and looked at her from the top of the rims; this made Sei roll her eyes. "You know, I can't understand what went wrong between you and I, Satou-san. What have I ever done to you to deserve this treatment?" He was smiling, though, and his tone was only mockingly hurt.

Sei pursed her lips. "You didn't do anything. Why do I need a particular reason to dislike you? You dislike me in the same way—for no reason at all—so I would think you'd understand perfectly. We're just the kind of people who are destined to never get along."

"Like two dogs who sniff each other and mutually decide that the smell is disagreeable, so they start fighting out of nowhere?"

"Exactly," Sei replied, and hurried her pace, as if to escape him, though she knew he could just easily speed up.

"Well," he said, pulling up more closely beside her. He unlocked the passenger door. "If you don't stink too much today, there's something I think we should talk about. It concerns Alice-kun."

Sei's feet scraped against the concrete as she stopped in her tracks. She got inside the car.

"So," Kashiwagi said in his typically overly-casual manner. They shot down the road at an unreasonable speed for awhile, with neither of them bothering to start the conversation at first.

Sei sat in the passenger seat with her arms crossed, looking out the window. "Indeed. What is it that you want to tell me about Alice? Spit it out already."

Kashiwagi didn't answer right away. He locked Sei in a scrutinizing gaze. "Satou-san, have you...taken to fencing with two swords lately, if you don't mind my asking? Are you swinging both ways, if you catch my drift?"

Sei glared at him. "One sword is quite enough for me," she replied, "though I don't see why those labels even matter. You probably realize that I'm not interested in men—and if you're asking for yourself, then I'm _definitely_ not interested, as fancy and womanly as you may act sometimes."

Instead of being offended, Kashiwagi laughed. "Those labels seemed to matter a lot to you before. Remember that you asked me the same thing when you found Sachiko and I outside during the rehearsals for _Cinderella_."

"That was years ago," Sei said, scratching her chin and trying to conjure up the memory. "In context, I was trying to figure out if you were a potential molester. Turns out you were—just not the kind I had expected." She returned his glance. "What does any of this have to do with Alice?"

"I merely asked because it seems that perhaps you have developed a taste for...Alice's sword, specifically. Which is not the kind you usually handle, is it? It takes practice to do it well, you know."

"Shut up—and stop being disgusting." As flatly as she said it, Sei couldn't help but be surprised that he knew. She fought the urge to ask him who he had been talking to. "At any rate, Alice is a girl, albeit not a very typical one. Nothing out of my usual pattern. So yes, I'm still quite gay, even if it isn't any of your business, Kashiwagi."

Some moments passed, and Kashiwagi continued: "It's not a coincidence that I dropped by here," he confessed. "I saw you wandering towards Alice's house earlier and I grew a bit concerned. You see, I've been over her house a lot recently. Her mother has mentioned you several times."

"Oh?"

He nodded. "I'm afraid it's not good, Satou-san. Alice's mother is not aware of my...preferences, so she sees me simply as a well-to-do senpai for her son. She trusts me. She's known me for years. You, however—she spoke very poorly of you." He turned towards her and there was a sincerity in his eyes that made Sei uncomfortable. "In fact, she spoke harshly enough that I found myself defending you."

"Right," Sei huffed on reflex.

"No, really. Not that it matters, but underneath that shell of animosity between us, I actually do rather like you, Satou-san," he said with no shred of irony. "I think you're a very honest person with good intentions, and you don't deserve that kind of abuse."

Sei stared at him. She fought the smile that began to form on her face. "Fair enough. I may dislike you, but of course I also like you on some level, though you will never hear me admit that ever again, so savor it while you can."

Kashiwagi laughed and tipped his head down, as if to bow slightly in her direction. "I'm honored to share this rare moment with you, then." But his face quickly became serious again. "I'm worried about Alice. By the way she acts when your name is mentioned, it was plainly obvious to me that she likes you, that something is going on between the two of you. You've been _seeing_ each other in secret, haven't you? I don't think her mother realizes consciously, but something inside her must have sensed the...distinct aroma of the situation, because she seemed determined to push you away somehow."

"She did. It's done. I was fired this morning." Sei looked out the window, a sardonic expression on her face. "Her mother told me that I would never see her again." The words had been harder to say than she had expected.

"That doesn't surprise me all that much. I thought this would happen, actually." He offered Sei a sympathetic smile as they began to pull up towards the Lillian gates. "But you're not the kind of person to give up that easily, are you?"

Before Sei reached for the handle of the car door, she turned to him with a questioning expression. "All right, what do you suggest, then? Obviously you picked me up because you wanted to give me some kind of unsolicited advice."

He smirked. "Frankly, I can't be of much help. The Arisugawa mother is an iron barrier that even I can't push through. Even if I found a way to sneak you into the house, she would find out right away. I will tell you this, though: she had been planning to marry Alice off for a long time. In her mind, it's the cure for all of Alice's apparent ills. Now that this incident with you has occurred, she's only going to redouble her efforts to find her dear Kintarou a wife."

At this, Sei couldn't help but wince. The thought of seeing Alice with another person wasn't particularly distasteful in and of itself, but the thought of the girl being forced to play groom disturbed Sei more than a little. She shook her head. "So what are you saying?"

"I'm saying that your chance to see Alice again may lie in your willingness to throw a wrench in a few social norms—which I know an uncouth woman like yourself should excel at. Alice's next _miai_ is scheduled in five days. Perhaps you might coincidentally get the urge to make a reservation at the same restaurant where she'll be meeting her potential suitor."

Sei stared at him, stunned, while he handed her a business card.

"I'm sure you'll know what to do when the time comes," he said.

Kashiwagi peeled off the moment Sei stepped out and slammed the car door shut. The cool spring air greeted her, and the sound of fresh leaves rustling in the wind filled her ears. She shuffled slowly through the open gates, still completely lost in thought, her mind in a haze that greatly contrasted the clear blue skies.

Then she heard footsteps rushing behind her.

"Satou-san! Hey! Satou-san, is that you?" It was an unfortunately familiar voice.

Sei turned and waved at the girl unenthusiastically. "Ah...Kawakami. Didn't see you there. 'Morning."

"Good morning to you too, Satou-san!" As usual, she seemed oblivious to Sei's disinterest. Perhaps she simply assumed that Sei was like this with everyone. "Where have you been these past few weeks?" she asked, her tone a bit demanding. "I miss you. You ran off that one night so suddenly. Why don't we study together tonight?" She paused for a moment, looking over her shoulder at the road. "By the way, who was that guy who dropped you off in the red car? I've never seen you show up with anyone like _that_ before."

Sei looked Kawakami dead in the face for a long, extended, awkward moment. "That was my boyfriend."

It took all of Sei's inner strength not to burst out laughing, but the pale look of utter shock on Kawakami's face made it all worth it.

* * *

The last warm rays of sunlight shown as a red glow through the blinds, and Yumi watched in contented silence as it filled the house with a dash of color. She was in the kitchen, poking the last bits of rice in her bowl with her chopsticks, but her eyes kept moving back towards the living room, which was still bathed with natural evening light.

Her mother had been humming to herself over the sink, rinsing off the pots and pans, but it soon dawned on Yumi that the song had ended awhile ago, and that a new sound with a repetitive chorus played through the room instead.

"Yumi-chan? Yumi? Yumi…?" her mother said. "Did you hear me?"

"Huh?" Yumi looked up at her as soon as she snapped out of her daze. Truth be told, though, she was still very much distracted. So much had happened only the night before and she wasn't even close to making any sense of it.

"Sheesh, you'd think it wouldn't cost you much to pay attention to me for one second," her mother grumbled in an exaggerated tone. She was smiling warmly, though. "I said that you should drop me a line next time you spend the night at a friend's house. I'm glad you're home now in one piece, but I was worried sick this morning when I saw that you hadn't come back all night." She reached out and patted Yumi on the head, a gesture she hadn't offered since Yumi was about five years old. "I know that my sweet little daughter is all grown up, but as long as you still live with us, I'm going to worry about you. You might have been kidnapped! So just let me know when you plan on doing that so I don't have to call the police, okay?"

"Yes ma'am, yes ma'am," Yumi said, then bowed her head deeply in mock apology over the table. "It won't happen again. I shall let you know."

"Good." Her mother looked satisfied for the moment, and turned to go back to wiping the plates down. "No harm done—this time. You said you were with that girl from the Yamayurikai, right? She seems fairly responsible to me, so at least I know you weren't running off into the dark night with a bunch of boys or something."

Yumi couldn't suppress a chuckle. "Yeah, that's not going to happen with her."

Her mother, seemingly oblivious to the meaning, nodded happily as she reached over to clear Yumi's food from the table. After she had grabbed the mostly-empty bowl by the rim, however, she stopped for a moment and looked at Yumi. "Yumi-chan," she said, "since it's just us girls tonight, I'd like to ask you something."

Yumi cocked her head to the side. "W-what?" It was strange how her mother had become so serious so quickly.

"Well, you've seemed rather...sullen lately." She let go of the bowl and instead pulled out the chair directly in front of Yumi and sat down. "Is it anything you need to talk about? I know you have a tendency to keep things bottled up inside until they finally burst out of you rather painfully. Remember what happened while you were in high school?"

Yumi knew exactly what she was talking about, but she couldn't help but give her a wry look. "I've matured since then. I know my limits better now." She managed to smile a little. "There's no problem...with me, specifically. I've just been worried about a friend. She's been dealing with an impending marriage arrangement after she graduates and her heart isn't in it, I guess." It wasn't the whole truth, but that was some of it.

"Oh dear. At such a young age?"

"Yeah," Yumi said, "but something tells me that she's going to be all right, so it's really not a problem. Whatever she decides, I support her."

"Ahh well, I suppose college isn't too young to be thinking about marriage." Her mother's face took on a wistful look. "I forget how quickly you're growing up. Pretty soon you'll be bringing boys home and introducing them awkwardly to your father, I'm sure."

"I don't know about _that_."

"As long as the person treats you well, it doesn't matter who you marry, Yumi-chan." She said the last part pointedly, with an odd deliberateness. As she finally grabbed Yumi's bowl and began to stand up, there was a strange look her eyes that Yumi couldn't interpret, something with a touch of mystery—but it disappeared quickly. "I hope he's cute, though. Like that friend of Yuuki's that I see coming over every once in awhile. He'd be a nice match, don't you think?"

"Oh, please," Yumi said, rolling her eyes. "You don't have to marry me off already—especially not to Yuuki's friends."

Yumi's mother laughed and turned back around to put her bowl in the sink. As she opened the faucet, Yumi couldn't see her face, but somehow she could sense that she was still smiling long after her giggles had subsided.

"Now, that Sei-sama, though," her mother said suddenly. Yumi froze at the mention of Sei's name. Her heart jolted with a single beat that she felt in her throat. "Tall, confident, and with those handsome gray eyes. She's pretty dreamy, too, isn't she?"

"Mom!" Yumi shrieked. She felt a searing heat immediately rising to her cheeks. "Oh my God! Stop!"

Her mother looked over her shoulder and gave her a rather sly smirk. "Ah-ha. See? I know you better than you think I do, Yumi-chan." She looked at Yumi with an openly affectionate face. "Like I said, it doesn't matter who you choose, as long as they treat you well—and don't keep you out until ungodly hours without so much as a phone call." The last part had a tone of warning.

Yumi stared at her mother in awe. "Y-yes ma'am," she managed to say somehow. After that, though, she found that she was very speechless. After everything that had happened in the past several days, this was one of the more pleasant surprises.

While her mother laughed again at her embarrassment, she turned her face towards the window and found that night was nearly on the verge of falling.

It was the end of her first day without the burdens that she had carried for so many years. Contrary to her mother's apparent hopes, Sei wasn't the marrying type—but she had guided Yumi through a painful haze and helped her find an elusive kind of freedom, which was in many ways far better.

* * *

 _A/N:_

 _Whoa, looks like I'm on a roll today! Once I started writing this chapter, I couldn't stop, haha. As always, if you have any comments, feel free to throw them at me!_


	11. Chapter 11: Leaning Over the Bridge

_A/N:_

 _So, if you're re-reading this chapter and it seems a bit different than before, you're not going crazy, haha. I didn't like how the first version turned out, so I heavily edited this chapter. (I've done this several times before, and didn't mention it because the changes were minimal.) The direction of the scenes are still exactly the same, so it doesn't affect the story. It was more for stylistic choices and some issues with internal monologue that I edited it._

* * *

 **Chapter 11:** **Leaning Over the Bridge**

"Excuse me, excuse me!"

Yumi pressed her face against the wood of the door frame in defeat. The musty smell of old books wafted easily through the cracks and she could just barely see the outline of the bookcases through the frosted glass. It looked like there was a small, glowing lamp in the far corner of the room, but she couldn't tell if anyone was standing near it. Otherwise, the room looked devoid of life, only the dull sunlight that oozed through the windows giving any sense of warmth or occupancy.

She clutched the small paperback by her side and knocked against the door again. This was the third time, and she was just about ready to give up. She knew the library was officially closed on Sunday, and that there was a high chance that the usual girl who organized the shelves wouldn't be working so late during the weekend, but it was worth a shot considering the alternative.

She had already tried to donate the book on Friday. The sister who had been manning the front desk immediately frowned as Yumi presented it, pushing the book back over the counter as if Yumi had offered some kind of smutty magazine. "I'm sorry, but we don't carry books like _these_ in our collection."

The nun gave her a withering stare and Yumi had been unable to come up with any reply in the moment. So instead, she nodded meekly and rushed back out the door, her cheeks burning with both embarrassment and annoyance.

Still, she couldn't get the idea of donating the book out of her head. Ever since she had re-discovered it at the bottom of her desk drawer a few days before, she had this weird inkling that someone in the school would need it some day—the same way she had years before.

In a sense, it was an offering to Maria-sama, out of gratitude for everything that God had given her over the past week.

But after the close encounter with the ornery nun, she decided that she'd need to be a bit more discreet about such an infamous novel. She knew that a classmate of hers occasionally tidied up the library on Sunday afternoons, and it struck her that she might be able to call in a favor and stealthy get that paperback officially on the shelves. That plan seemed fine until she was faced with a locked door and not a single person in sight.

Yumi sighed and peered one last time through the hazy glass of the door. When she still could not make out even a vague shadow of human presence, she resigned herself, her shoes giving out a loud squeak as she spun around to go back. Once she had taken two hesitant steps, though, she thought she felt a rush of air behind her.

Her body jerked with the sudden excitement of possibility. She quickly turned, her movements messy, her smile a bit too eager.

But as soon as she met eyes with the girl whose face had appeared between the crack of the door, she stopped. It was a somewhat familiar face, but it was certainly not the person she had expected to see. In fact…

The girl stared at her with a question in her eyes and it took Yumi a moment to place where she had last seen her.

"Ah...Kawakami-san?" Yumi guessed, taken off guard by the circumstances. Yumi recognized her as an upperclassman who had done a few group projects with Sachiko-sama—and she had also noticed the girl consorting with Sei before—but otherwise they didn't know each other that well. "Good afternoon. Uh, where's Sasaki-san? I thought she was the one who worked at the library after school."

"We both do," Kawakami answered, her tone rather flat and lifeless. Some kind of dark mood had overtaken her, and Yumi could feel it immediately emanating from behind the door to the point where it made her uncomfortable. Even still, the girl's eyes were darting up and down Yumi's body, as if she were trying to make sense of what she was seeing. "We alternate days," she explained, "but today we were both supposed to do some inventory since the end of the school year is coming up in a few weeks. Sasaki is at home, though. She came down with a fever, so I'm all alone in here." The girl paused with an awkward look on her face. "...Fukuzawa-san?"

"Yes?" Yumi answered automatically, still a bit confused.

Kawakami nodded then. "Yes, I thought that was you. You're Ogasawara-san's 'little sister,' right? And...Satou-san's friend." Her voice sounded strange when she said the last part. Her mouth seemed to tighten on Sei's name.

 _Ah, she's still awkward about Sei-sama,_ Yumi thought to herself. In a sense, Yumi couldn't blame her, considering that last she heard, Sei had rejected her quite open advances.

Kawakami must have taken Yumi's silence as confirmation, because she pulled the door open further and waved at her to step past the threshold. "Come in," she said quickly. When Yumi obliged, she shut the door behind them.

As it turned out, the small light that Yumi had seen from the outside was coming from a wide table near the middle of the library. It was strewn from corner to corner with books, some of which were stacked neatly, and some of which were open and positioned near a chair, as if someone had been reading them.

Seeing the library in this uncommon level of disarray was a bit of a distracting novelty, enough that Yumi lost her train of thought at first. She stared at the empty shelves of the nearby bookcase, feeling a bit uncomfortable that she had walked in so abruptly on the library's nakedness. The more polite part of her wanted to apologize, but before she could feel too weird about it, she felt that steady gaze scrutinizing her once again.

Yumi looked at Kawakami, who was looking at her in turn with expectation.

"What can I do for you, Fukuzawa-san?"

"Uh, um, this book," Yumi stuttered. She wasn't sure why she was nervous; maybe it was because she had already tried to offer the donation before and was unambiguously rejected. When she noticed that Kawakami had raised an eyebrow in confusion, Yumi tried to collect her thoughts. She took a breath and held the small book out towards her companion. "Pardon me for the intrusion, but I came to donate this," she said, bowing slightly. "The library has a popular fiction section, doesn't it? I thought this would be perfect for it."

Kawakami tilted her head. "Oh, is that all?" She graciously accepted the novel with both hands and sauntered towards the front desk.

Not knowing what else to do, Yumi followed her.

"Of course," the girl added, when they had reached the counter, "it will have to go through an approval process before we put it on the shelf—but we're grateful for the submission."

Yumi gritted her teeth slightly. "Ah, is that so?" She mentally calculated what the chances were that it would be accepted. If it fell into the hands of the right librarian, then they might not notice or care about the contents. At the very least, she had increased the odds by finding someone who was willing to even start the process.

Yumi heard some rustling coming from behind the counter as Kawakami stooped down and disappeared to rummage through some of the drawers. She reappeared shortly after, a few very official-looking print-outs in her hand. She grabbed a pen from a nearby tray, but as her hand hovered over one of the pages and she seemed to finally examine the book's title, she stopped. She stared at the cover for a long time.

" _The Forest of Thorns_ ," Kawakami said, her tone so blank that Yumi couldn't tell if she was uttering the title for the first time.

"Do you know it?" Yumi asked. Either way, she wasn't sure if Kawakami's familiarity with the book would be a good thing or a bad thing.

But the girl shook her head. "No," she said. "I just thought I might have heard the title before. If I'm not mistaken, it was a popular read at Lillian high school a few years ago, but I only started going here my first year of university, so I have no idea what it's about."

"It's...a tragic love story, you could say," Yumi mumbled. Perhaps it was best if Kawakami didn't know, especially considering the nature of the rumors that had surrounded it.

Yumi winced a little when Kawakami turned the book around in her hand and started silently reading the back. The girl's eyes widened momentarily as the realization seemed to dawn on her.

"Ah, I see," she said. "It's _that_ sort of novel. I can see why you chose to come when the sisters weren't in." She put the book down. She looked up at Yumi with an enigmatic expression. "Is that all?"

Yumi stared at her. "Uh, yes. Yes, that's all!" she said, a bit thrown off. For some reason, she had expected further questions. She nodded and started to take her leave with deliberate slowness, knowing that if she dashed out of the library as quickly as she wanted, it would be terribly rude.

Just as she was about to turn around, though, Kawakami stopped her.

"Fukuzawa-san, wait."

When Yumi looked at her, the girl gave out a pained sigh. She was staring at the desk beneath her, averting her eyes from Yumi's gaze. Kawakami's face was now eerily obscured by the shadow of her shoulder-length hair, and the dark mood from earlier had begun to seep back into the room. The girl seemed to take a moment, to steel herself, as if she were working up the nerve to say something distasteful.

"Fukuzawa-san," she said finally, "how well do you know Satou-san?"

"Hah?" Yumi blurted out. It was one of those random vocalizations that her Onee-sama frequently disapproved of, but that she often couldn't help when faced with the unexpected. She cleared her throat and tried again, shooting for coherence this time. "I—I suppose I could say that I know her well. Those sorts of things are hard to measure, of course."

"How long?"

"Er, since high school. About four years, I guess. Four years this coming fall," Yumi said, looking at Kawakami with confusion. "Why do you ask?"

Kawakami shook her head, her hair dancing around over her face until Yumi couldn't even see her eyes anymore. "No reason. I just see the two of you walking together sometimes. You seem very close."

Yumi couldn't help the blush that was threatening to crawl up her cheeks. "What do you mean?" She tried not to give anything away with her expression, but it was exceedingly difficult.

"Would you mind if I asked something? About her? You don't have to answer if you don't want to." Kawakami's voice was growing shakier and she still wouldn't look up. She had started playing nervously with the papers on the desk, her hands tearing a small piece off the corner of a sheet.

Yumi didn't like where this seemed to be going. While she knew that Sei didn't go to huge lengths to hide anything about herself, having someone else talk about such personal matters was another thing entirely. Even being so close with Sei-sama, Yumi felt like she had no right to gossip about what Kawakami was probably going to ask.

"There was nothing there," the girl said suddenly, without waiting for Yumi's reply. Yumi could just barely see the whites of the girl's widened eyes as they gleamed in the dying sunlight. Her stare was still pointed squarely at the desk. "I tried," she said, "and there was nothing there. I feel stupid now." The girl let out a loud breath, and to Yumi's horror, she realized that it was nothing more than a suppressed sob. Kawakami's fingers curled tightly against the desk, her nails sliding along the wood with an unpleasant sound. "Now I wonder if I really did make everything up in my head. Maybe there was no connection between us at all, and I was just desperate to find someone who could understand the feelings that I was fighting with. Maybe it was unfair of me to throw all of that onto Satou-san, just because she...because she's also…."

A part of Yumi wanted to desperately turn and sprint out the door behind her. Her muscles were stiff with energy, an energy that had grown more and more with each piece of Kawakami's semi-coherent explanation.

But Yumi planted her feet hard into the carpeted floor. She couldn't understand everything that Kawakami was getting at, but she could understand that it was supposed to be important. She forced herself to listen.

"Now I don't even know if she's actually…," Kawakami trailed off, then shook her head again. "No, it doesn't matter if she is or not. I mean, I was sure of it. I had heard the rumors around school, and then when I heard my aunt complaining about her—Satou-san tutors my cousin, you see—it only confirmed it even more. But whether she is or she isn't, it's not right for me to assume that she owes me any of her time just because we have... _that_ in common."

Filled with a sudden rush of sympathy, Yumi found it in herself to take a step forward. She hesitated for only a moment, like a weak force-field of unpleasant emotion was pushing her back from the desk. Still, she reached towards Kawakami and put a hand on the back of the girl's tensed fingers. "What was it that you wanted to ask, Kawakami-san?" she said gently. She tried to smile, even if they couldn't see each other very well.

Kawakami looked up at her finally. The increasing dimness of the room made the finer details of her expression look smeared, like a blended charcoal drawing. Only the corners of her eyes looked sharp and tight with suppressed emotion. "Nothing, I guess. It doesn't matter now. It's probably better that I let things go, especially now that I saw that she has a boyfriend."

Yumi blinked. Her mind became blank in the face of something so totally unexpected. For a moment, nothing computed in her brain, and then finally a wave of amused confusion reached her. If it hadn't been completely inappropriate in the emotional air of the situation, she might have laughed out loud. "Pardon me, Kawakami-san," she said, fighting a crooked smile that threatened to erupt on her face, "but we're talking about _Sei-sama_ here, right? _Satou Sei-sama?_ "

"Yes?" Kawakami said, looking carefully at Yumi's face. "I ran into her this last week. She was with some rich boy, parading around in a sports car. I either completely misread her at first or she's trying to hide what she does by dating a man. Either way, it's not my place to interfere, of course." She brought a hand up to wipe her eyes. "I just feel so alone sometimes. Like I'm the only one."

 _The only one._

Yumi's eyes widened. Without thinking, she grabbed hold of Kawakami's hand and blurted out, "You're not the only one! I promise. _Trust me_. There are plenty of people like us!"

Kawakami's breath hitched. She had been staring down at the desk again, her tears dropping heavily on the stack of papers in front of her, leaving wet stains all over the neatly-printed ink. When what Yumi said appeared to sink in, she slowly lifted her head. "'People like _us_ '?"

The sudden look of hope in her eyes made it impossible for Yumi to regret her outburst. Instead of retreating like a small part of her wanted to do again, she took half a step closer and found herself nodding in confirmation. "I'm like that, too, Kawakami. And…." She stopped for a moment, thought carefully about what she was about to say, and then decided that there was no good reason not to say it. "Sei-sama is like that. You weren't wrong. She doesn't hide it, either. It's not some big secret."

Kawakami looked at her with confusion. "What about the guy in the red car?"

"A red car?" Yumi asked. But the thought had hit her before she had even finished saying it: _Kashiwagi._

Yumi shook her head and gave the girl an amused look. "If it's who I think you're talking about, then that's my Onee-sama's fiancé. He and Sei-sama are just friends...sort of. Even if she was into that kind of thing, he'd be the last person she would date." Still, she had no idea why Sei would be riding around with Kashiwagi. That was a question for another time, though.

"Oh," Kawakami said simply. For some reason, this revelation served to calm her down a bit. Her face seemed to relax and her breathing seemed to grow less labored, though a few teary hiccups escaped from her nonetheless. "I wonder why she told me he was her boyfriend, then."

" _What?_ " Yumi said before she could stop herself.

On some level, she couldn't believe the lengths of absolute insensitivity that Sei was willing to go to, but on the other hand she couldn't say she was totally surprised. There were so many things that she loved about Satou Sei, but this was definitely one of the more difficult features to deal with. She had the habit of playing with other people's emotions way too casually, without even realizing that she had.

Yumi clutched Kawakami's hand a little tighter, her expression sympathetic in the midst of a slight anger that was growing in her chest. "Please allow me to apologize in her place, Kawakami-san. What she said was inexcusable, but it was probably meant as a joke. She can be completely oblivious to people's feelings sometimes and she can end up saying very hurtful things. It's just how she is."

Kawakami said nothing for a long time as she appeared to take in this new information. She tipped her head up a little more and some of the light from the middle of the room reached her face again. Yumi could see that her cheeks were still a bit wet, but the glassy varnish of unspilled tears was missing from her eyes, much to Yumi's relief. Soon enough, she began nodding slowly. "It sounds like you _do_ know her rather well." Then Kawakami's body jerked slightly, as if a sudden thought had come to her mind. She mirrored Yumi's apologetic look and she leaned over the desk with an intensity that seemed to come out of nowhere. "Fukuzawa-san, I'm so sorry! I—I should have considered this before, but frankly it didn't even register until now. I didn't mean to intrude between the two of you. Are you and Satou-san…?"

Yumi pulled back a bit, taken off guard. She held in the light yelp that she was about to give out. She really should have anticipated that this line of questioning would come up eventually, but for some reason she hadn't.

There was no confusion, though. She knew exactly how she wanted to answer. The real issue was whether she had the nerve. Yumi wavered for a moment, but then finally she looked Kawakami in the eyes.

"Yes," she murmured. Intuitively, it felt like the right answer to Yumi. It was the answer that had floated up into her mind first, above the barrage of uncertainty and fuzzy lines, even above the doubt she had felt after spending the past few days without speaking to Sei even once. Somehow, if she had answered any other way, she felt like she would have been lying. "Sei-sama and I are together," she said confidently. And that was it.

"Ah!" Kawakami said, her face looking simultaneously deflated and relieved somehow. "Ah, no wonder. That's explains a lot. I'm sorry."

"You don't have to apologize," Yumi replied, giving her a genuine smile. She moved her hand from atop Kawakami's, and instead pressed it against the cover of the book that sat between them. She pushed it forward, until it was centimeters from the girl's chest. "I kept wanting to donate this to the library because I couldn't help but think that someone would be looking for a book like this someday. I didn't know it at the time, but it was exactly what I needed when I read it myself. It made me feel less alone. Maybe I already found the person who was meant to read this next, though. Maybe that person is you, Kawakami-san."

The girl looked at Yumi gratefully, traces of a smile finally appearing on her face. She touched the edges of the book with curiosity, as if she had only just noticed that it was there. "Thank you, Fukuzawa-san," she said.

Yumi gave her a small bow and pulled her hand back until it rested lightly on the left side of her chest. "You can call me Yumi, you know," she said. "That's the custom for those of us who grew up in the academy division. Besides, we've already over-shared enough that I think we can go by our first names, huh?"

Kawakami let out a small laugh. "Thank you, Yumi-san," she repeated. "I guess all of this wasn't really about Satou-san at all, was it? I really need to think about these feelings I've been having towards...certain kinds of people. Maybe it's something I should explore on my own before I try to act on it."

Yumi nodded. "If you ever need someone to talk to, though, you can come to me...Keiko-san. _You're not alone._ "

Kawakami smiled and picked up the book, pressing it against her chest, holding a posture not unlike that of Yumi's. They looked at each other in silence for a moment, an appreciative, supportive silence, the kind that came with accepting each other completely for no particular reason. _I see you—the real you,_ Yumi's gaze was saying, and so was the gaze that returned to her from the other side of the desk.

Before long, the mood began to shift. As soon as the rush of the moment subsided, Kawakami turned back down to the paperwork with embarrassment and began to methodically fill in all of the lines.

Yumi glanced at her one last time, bowed again, and murmured a polite goodbye before making her way towards the door. The pages of the open books by the far table rustled as she passed by.

When she reached the exit, though, she paused. She debated making one last thing known because it struck her that it wouldn't be very fair if she didn't. She looked over her shoulder at the girl behind the desk and called out, "Say, Keiko-san."

"Y-yes?" Kawakami said, perhaps still a bit unused to being called by her first name.

"Sei-sama and I are together," Yumi said, "but you don't have to be sorry for liking her. It doesn't bother me."

Kawakami's eyebrows shot up abruptly. "But…?"

Yumi couldn't help but feel a bit sheepish. This confession felt somehow more taboo and unusual than the one she had given just minutes before. Still, she managed to shrug, to give Kawakami an encouraging smile. "We have a very simple, very complicated relationship," she explained, "but that's something between Sei-sama and me, something that no one could interfere with. Now, I'm not going to pretend that she'll pay any attention to you—and maybe _you_ shouldn't, either, because there are sides to her that are very frustrating, to be honest—but I just think you should know that I'm not the one to stop you." Yumi paused for a moment, not quite sure if she was conveying it clearly enough. Finally, she looked at the girl directly and said, "You and I are not rivals for anything, Keiko-san."

She left before Kawakami could respond, her cheeks burning with a new kind of embarrassment that she couldn't quite define. On the one hand, a small part of her brain was mumbling that she shouldn't have said all of that—but on the other hand, some deeper part was pleased that she had told the whole truth.

* * *

Sei tried to focus on her breath and drown out her other senses. Externally, there wasn't much going on to ignore. The last few birds were nearly finished giving off their chirps as the light died away, and there weren't too many cars slithering around anymore.

Inside, though, there was a cacophony of sound, thoughts that bounced off the walls of her skull like ricocheting bullets.

As the last few days had passed, it seemed like there was nothing she could do to calm the barrage of emotions. She had sat at the edge of many park benches and idled in the middle of many empty libraries. She had closed her eyes and tried to pretend that life could go on as it had before, that she could somehow detach herself from everything that had happened. And even along with the weariness, that vague pressure to act had begun to grow slowly as _that day_ came ever closer.

And now she sat at the top of a hill, trying to ignore the weight of indecision, trying to let her body fade into the cool air. She was not alone, and for once that seemed to help a little bit. The relative darkness helped, too.

They were a bit far from most of the street lamps, staring down at the neighborhood that spread in all directions, a view blocked only by the fencing and walls of the school. Moments before, the fading sun had painted the tiny leaves around them with a touch of pink, but now the sky had begun to fall and the colors had begun to disappear.

They were surrounded by trees and vines in a little alcove near a fence. Sei couldn't help but think that it felt a bit like she was sitting in a cave, especially as the moon began to replace the last bits of sun. Those brave first leaves of spring cast a grid-like pattern all over the ground, like they were shielding her from too much light, giving her a chance to turn inward instead. There was something comforting and uncomplicated about it, something that made her want to lean back and close her eyes.

 _I could sleep here tonight,_ she thought. _I could climb up that tree over there and become an animal, lose all of my human problems. I could tear off my clothes right now and turn into a caterpillar and forget all about my plans tonight._

At this thought, she couldn't help but laugh. She imagined the look of bewilderment on the faces of the Lillian faculty as they'd be forced to call the fire department on Monday morning. Since it was already Sunday evening, though, and almost everyone had sauntered home, she figured she'd have at least one night to herself before being discovered.

"What's so funny?" A voice emerged from below.

Sei looked down at the strands of silky black hair that were draped over her knee, at the familiar profile of that face that was pressed against her thigh. In an unusual reversal of roles, it was Katou this time who was stretched out and relaxed, her body strewn lazily along the grass.

Her head was in Sei's lap. When Sei had first noticed this some minutes before, she had tried her best not to act surprised. Kei was hardly ever the one to touch her first—when she was sober, anyway—but every once in awhile, some affectionate mood would strike her, and she would hold Sei's hand, or lean against her without warning, or even just look her way with a small semblance of tenderness.

But before long, she would always go back to their typical distance. Because it was always so fleeting and their friendship so often tepid, Sei didn't want to discourage her this time. Katou had actually been the one to suggest that they watch the sunset, which Sei had found particularly strange, enough that she had to fight the urge to make mocking comments about it.

She held still and looked at Kei with a wistful smile.

"I was just thinking that I should become a caterpillar," Sei explained with no context, as usual.

Katou didn't even turn her head to look up at her. She continued to stare off into the distance, at the path that led down the hill and towards the street. "You never even try to make any sense, do you?"

"Maybe it's your ears that aren't hearing any sense," Sei replied. She had a weird feeling that she should reach down and touch Katou's face, perhaps because it seemed so open and vulnerable at the moment. She held back the impulse, though.

Katou sighed. "At least this is closer to your usual self. I was starting to wonder if the real Satou Sei-san had been abducted by aliens."

"Whaaat?" Sei chuckled at this, too. "Now you're the one who's not making any sense."

Katou finally rolled over slightly. She gave Sei a wry look—but there was a touch of concern there. The eye contact immediately made their relative positions feel more intimate, and Katou seemed to notice this quickly as well; a tiny blush colored her cheeks, even through the mild annoyance.

"I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, Sei-san," she murmured. "You've been staring into space all day. You've been acting weird in general these past few weeks, but today it's like you've disappeared into another dimension altogether. I had to call your name five times when we ran into each other near the gate before you even realized it was me."

"Fair enough." Sei broke away from Kei's gaze and let herself fall backwards until she felt the grass crunch beneath her. The ground was softer than it had looked, comforting in its familiarity. The skinny blades seemed to weave themselves into her hair, grazing her scalp and making her head feel instantly cooler. "You're not wrong," she said after a moment, speaking up towards the trees.

"Does it have something to do with Fukuzawa-san?" Kei asked. Her head was still on Sei's leg, but Sei could feel her turning so that her voice projected more directly.

Sei said nothing at first, though she couldn't really tell why she was feeling a sudden wave of hesitation. Katou was a good friend of hers—probably one of her best friends at this point—and yet there were still certain things that never felt easy to say, even with her.

Katou had also made a guess that was just a bit too close.

Sei let out a long breath. "It has nothing to do with Yumi-chan, not directly anyway. Actually, she's been a big help. She's been handling me quite well, so you don't have to worry." She smirked at that, though she knew Katou couldn't see it.

"Oh? Well, I asked because she had seemed a bit out of sorts herself that day that all of you came to visit. You know, the day that girlfriend of yours had tagged along."

Sei jerked her head up, enough that she could meet Katou's eyes again. She gave her a wry look. "You're quite perceptive there, Katou-san, but Alice is not my girlfriend."

"Ah, so it has to do with _her_ , then," Kei said. Her self-satisfied look bothered Sei a little. Usually, Sei was ten steps ahead of most people, but this time she had walked right into the trap; the whole ordeal of the past few weeks must have been dulling her wits. Though truth be told, sometimes Katou was perceptive enough that it would catch her off guard.

"Is she the one that you've been hung up about this whole time, Satou-san?"

Sei stared at her. _A little too close,_ she thought.

After a moment where she seemed to contemplate what she should say next, Katou finally asked, "Is it because...she's a _different_ kind of girl? Is that the problem?"

Again, Sei tried not to react, but her eyes must have widened at least slightly with surprise because Katou's smile only grew more confident. "How did you know about that?" Sei said, managing to keep her voice neutral somehow. She looked at her friend with curiosity.

If she was perfectly honest, she found it perplexing that Katou knew. What exactly had given Alice away? Sei herself hadn't noticed that anything was different until...until she had felt the difference for herself. Obviously Katou hadn't gotten nearly that close to the girl. Maybe it was simply that lust had blinded Sei to the finer details that first night that she met Alice, and there was something big that she had completely missed.

Katou shrugged, her shoulder making the grass rustle lightly. "I _didn't_ know," she said, "not for sure, anyway. I've known a few people like her, though, so I got a certain vibe, you could say. It was merely an educated guess—which you just confirmed." She paused, and seemed unfazed by the annoyed look that Sei was throwing her. "So," she prodded again, "is that what the problem has been this whole time? Does it bother you that you're attracted to a girl like that?"

Sei tilted her head in contemplation—but it didn't take long for her to settle on an answer. "No," she said after a few seconds. "I don't care about that part. At first, it was kind of awkward, but pretty soon I realized that most things about her were the same as any other girl, and my raging hormones helped me figure out the rest."

It was Katou's turn to look surprised. "Ah, so you've actually…."

"Yes," Sei murmured, nodding but looking off at a distant patch of trees. "We have."

"Then what's the problem?"

At this, Sei felt her jaw convulse slightly. She felt that irritating warmth rising up her face, the same that she had felt days before, when she stood in front of a naked and vulnerable Alice in the old dressing room. She found it difficult to conjure up the memory of that encounter without a wave of tangled emotions filling her chest—frustration, arousal, anger, even an edge of fear that was making the tips of her eyelids swell with heat.

Somehow, she swallowed through it. Katou looked over at her with expectation, either oblivious to the internal conflict, or politely ignoring it.

"She...has too much of my attention," Sei whispered, her voice a bit hoarse. "It's been almost a week since I last saw her, and I haven't been able to forget about what happened between us, as much as I've tried. And I can't just ignore the fact that she's locked in that house, with two people who refuse to see who she is and who force her to dance around like a trained monkey." The image of those massive iron gates flashed in her mind for a moment and she grimaced at the memory. Slowly, though, the grimace turned into a cynical smile. "But I can't rescue that girl from herself, either. I'm no prince on a white horse."

"Why do you need to be a prince?" Kei said, in a huffing tone that made it sound like she wanted to roll her eyes. Still, she didn't. She gave Sei a pointed look. "All right, so I don't know your situation that well. Why can't you just be open with her, though? Why can't you tell her how you feel, and then let her decide what she wants to do?"

Sei pushed her hands hard against the dirt beneath her, until her fingertips could feel the roots of the grass. "You know me, Katou-san. I don't do vulnerability well. She'll probably reject me at this point; it's inevitable. The circumstances just don't line up for us."

"Then it sounds like she's perfect for you," Katou told her, quite unexpectedly. When Sei gave her a questioning look, she explained, "You can't have love without a certain amount of vulnerability, can you? It seems that you're perfectly fine being completely open with anyone else about who you are—it's like you're invincible, completely impervious to outside forces, like no one can ever get to you—except when it comes to romantic love, which you run away from. Maybe she's the one who will finally expose those weak parts of you and bring them out to the light."

Sei took a hard breath once again and stared at Katou with confusion. "I'm not invincible," she said.

Katou laughed. "You could have fooled me—at least when I first met you. You seemed completely unconcerned with what anybody else was doing or what anybody thought of you. It's actually extremely attractive. It's no wonder Fukuzawa-san chases you around the way she does."

"She does not," Sei protested, if only because Katou had pushed her into a contradictory mood. Kei was sort of right, though. The rather humble Yumi made a natural counterpart to the aloof and overly-confident Sei. They had always been drawn to each other like the opposing poles of a magnet.

Katou paused, as if she were thinking something over. Then her face relaxed suddenly in some kind of resignation. "Actually, it wasn't just Fukuzawa-san. As long as we're being honest here, I may as well tell you that I really liked you when we first met."

Sei stared at her, a bit stunned, but still unwilling to assume what Katou had meant. "Do you mean…?" It wasn't like it made a difference now after all this time, but Sei couldn't help feeling curious nonetheless—especially since she had clumsily pursued Katou for a short time back then, and had been mostly ignored.

"Yeah." The light blush had returned to Katou's face. Then she added, pointedly: " _Liked_. Past tense."

"Why didn't you tell me?" Sei found herself asking, in a voice that was a bit more demanding than she had intended.

Katou pursed her lips and shook her head. "C'mon, Satou-san. Even then I knew very well the kind of walls I would have to chisel through to get you to go there with me. Even if those walls were light-hearted and built from your goofiness, they were walls just the same. Somehow I knew that I wasn't the one to do it. I don't know if I have the patience." She smiled softly; it was the generous smile of a person who was about to deliver a stinging rejection. "It wasn't always the easiest thing to ignore, especially since I knew you liked me back, but sometimes Satou Sei-san is just too much to deal with."

Sei felt her vision growing fuzzy, felt her eyes glazing over in stunned realization. "Well damn," she whispered. "Who else have I pushed away without even realizing?"

"Fukuzawa-san, for sure," Katou said, and her tone made it sound like it should have been obvious. "That girl is hopelessly in love with you—and don't tell me that you didn't know. I think her saving grace is that she's known you for so long, so she's had time to wear you down, to earn your trust."

"You've been watching us rather carefully." Sei stared at Katou again, her eyebrows raised, her tone one of playful accusation.

"I didn't have to watch much. Once you know what to look for, it becomes completely obvious. Fukuzawa's face is an open book." She rolled over onto her back, her shoulders pressing into the meaty part of Sei's thigh. Her gaze seemed to look up and through the canopy of the nearby trees, perhaps at the stars beyond them. "I think this Alice girl has something else, though. If I had to guess, there's some element to the connection that makes you question something about yourself, something that forces you to face your fear. You're not friends with each other, right?"

Sei shook her head. She wasn't sure what Katou was getting at, though. "We're strangers, practically."

"Maybe that's it," Kei said. "Maybe there's no friendship there that allows you to pretend that what you have with her is anything other than what it is. It's just plain, uncomplicated passion—the kind of thing that terrifies you. To pursue that would mean to trust a stranger with the most vulnerable parts of you. You told me before that you're more romantic with your platonic friends, and that you purposefully sleep with people who you're not that close to, and that this compartmentalization keeps you from facing too much drama and intensity. Well, in that sense, Alice-san is the worst of both worlds for you, isn't she? You have romantic feelings for her, but you barely know her."

At this, Sei took pause. It was true. In this sense, Alice was the biggest danger she had faced in a long time. Without the veneer of friendship, there was nowhere to hide, no pleasantries as a distraction. Everything about their relationship was extreme. It very much mirrored what she had experienced for that intense year with Kubo Shiori, a relationship that had defined her entire emotional landscape for years—and perhaps still did.

There were definitely artifacts left over from that time, wounds that were triggered by Alice's presence. As with Alice, she had fallen in love with Shiori immediately, as a complete stranger. The love was completely irrational. It had grown not from shared experience or trust or logic, but from some swell of raw instinct inside of her.

Katou was right: it was terrifying. This instinct was like a dormant monster that lived inside of her, one that she had mistakenly thought died years ago, the moment Shiori had generously abandoned her at a train station. Something in Alice had awoken it from its long slumber and now it haunted Sei relentlessly.

She brought her hand up to rub her face and let Kei's words sink into her brain for a moment. "There was something about her, from the moment I met her," Sei began. She looked at Kei, but could barely see her as the moon began to disappear behind a cloud. "Maybe I _want_ to trust her with those parts of me. Maybe I _want_ to be hurt by her, deep down. Kind of like when you lean over a bridge and some weird impulse to jump comes over you for no reason, even if you're scared to death of falling."

Katou glanced at her with some concern. "That's not exactly what I meant. I don't want to see you turn into a masochist, either, Sei-san."

" _Is it_ masochism?" Sei asked. Then she smirked. "Maybe the only path to that invincibility that you mentioned is to face the pain. Maybe this is what I'll be doing later tonight—walking right over the edge of that suicidal bridge." But a gust of wind burst across the space between them just then, and she doubted that Katou had heard the last part. The wind picked up some of the dirt and sod that she had loosened unconsciously, which made her reflexively close her eyes.

When she had opened them again, she looked down at her left hand. Katou's fingers were ever so slightly grazing hers.

"Say, Satou-san," Katou said, lifting her head a little. "What _are_ those suicidal plans of yours? You keep mentioning that you have somewhere to be tonight, but you keep dragging your feet. Why won't you just leave already?"

"You're the one who asked me to come out here, so should you really be saying that, Katou?" Sei replied with a grin. Katou's tenderness was already fading, as Sei had anticipated. "To tell you the truth, I think I've been unconsciously sitting here, watching the entrance to the school, waiting for Yumi-chan to magically appear. I've been wanting to see that face."

"It's Sunday and she doesn't belong to any clubs, does she? Why would she be hanging around here?"

"Mmm, it's just a feeling I get, you could say. Sometimes I can tell when she's calling to me with her mind."

Katou rolled her eyes at this. She pulled her hand away from Sei's and began to sit up, the ground rustling with her movements. "You can always use this thing called a phone, you know."

"Nah," Sei said with a laugh, as if it were the silliest notion in the world. "When I see her, I'll see her. We've kind of been ignoring each other since Tuesday morning, so I'll let fate decide if I deserve it."

Katou raised an eyebrow. "Ignoring each other? Did something happen between you, Satou? More importantly, was it your fault again?"

 _Lots and lots of things happened_ , Sei thought, but she decided not to mention it, and she suppressed the inevitable smile that was fighting its way onto her face. "That's just the way we are," she said instead, and it was still the truth. "If we pull a little closer to each other than usual, then we need to push each other away for awhile."

"Are you sure that isn't just the way _you_ are?"

Sei thought about this for a moment, tapping her finger against her chin. As she was about to answer, though, a very familiar silhouette floated into her line of sight. At first she thought she was imagining it, given the topic of conversation and the suggestible state of her mind, but when she focused her eyes and the figure drew closer to the gate, it was unmistakable.

Katou seemed to have noticed, too. "If you aren't the Pied Piper, then I don't know who is," she said in a wry tone. She sounded totally unsurprised, in spite of her earlier skepticism. She turned to Sei. "Well, are you going to just stare at her like a creep or are you going to go up to her like a normal person, Satou-san?"

"Neither," Sei declared, hopping to her feet with renewed energy. "I'm going to go up to her like a creep."

Katou sighed loudly, but she seemed to be unable to hold back a smile. She waved Sei off, as if she were dismissing her and couldn't wait to be rid of her. It was the usual lie that they allowed to dance between them for propriety's sake.

Sei jogged a few paces down the hill, training her eyes on Yumi's form, feeling the essence of the wind as it filled her lungs. Even just seeing the girl gave her a strange rush of joy. She hadn't gone far when she felt her body stop short, though. Her heels dug into the ground.

Before she could second-guess herself, before she could make any excuses, before the strange wave of energy that filled her body had a chance to dissipate, she turned around and dashed back up the hill. She was met with the bewildered face of Katou Kei.

Sei immediately leaned down and pressed a kiss to the corner of Katou's lips. Most of it landed on her cheek.

"That's for tonight," she panted, nearly out of breath. "And for when we first met, when neither of us had the guts."

She waited for the slap, but it didn't come. Instead, Katou pressed her fingers to the edge of her mouth and stared at Sei, completely shocked, completely speechless. Before anything else could happen between them, Sei spun around and ran back down the hill, waving her hands in the air like a madman who had just escaped the asylum and burst into a world of freedom.

Sure enough, she caught the attention of a befuddled Yumi, but it was only half a second later when she realized that the girl wasn't alone. A second, taller figure regarded her from underneath the shadow of the outer gate, offering a gaze that somehow reminded her of Maria-sama's watchful eye.


	12. Chapter 12: Mirrors

**Chapter 12:** **Mirrors**

It was the frantic hoof beats sloshing against the grass that made Yumi turn around at first. She could see a lanky figure emerging from the darkness under the trees, messy hair billowing around in the wind, long arms dancing in the air. The woman who was dashing straight towards her looked like a wild animal who had just awoken with the nightly crickets and was ready to pounce on her in the dark.

Even before Yumi could clearly see her face, she already knew who it was. She recognized the pattern of her footfalls, the shape of her body. Her heart immediately thumped harder in her chest, the small bit of uncertainty that had haunted her throughout the week melting into gratitude.

When the light hit Sei's face, and Yumi could see that the older woman's eyes were locked directly on her, she blushed. She felt the intense focus of Satou Sei's attention very sharply in that moment, an intensity that awoke those feelings between them in mere seconds, wordlessly. This time, Yumi didn't resist it; she stood tall in the spotlight of Sei's gaze and didn't flinch.

When Sei reached her, she cupped Yumi's face with both her hands. A long, whistling breath escaped Sei's lips, a breath of excitement and exhaustion. It was contagious. Forgetting where she was for a moment, Yumi let her eyes flutter closed against Sei's touch. She could feel Sei's face moving closer, as if to kiss her—and without thinking, she allowed this, too.

But before their lips had touched, Yumi felt the vibrating voice of reason playing its song against her back, jolting her into reality once more.

"Isn't that a bit greedy?" the voice said. "Does it trouble Sei-sama that much to wait more than five seconds between people?"

On the surface, the words had been directed at Sei, but Yumi knew that the intention was to shame them both. Yumi pulled away immediately on reflex and turned around to face her Onee-sama.

"Pardon us, Onee-sama," Yumi said, her gaze falling downward, just as it always had whenever Sachiko chided her. At this point, it was mostly out of habit, mostly out of show. Even now, it was easy to fall into the role of the obedient little sister and she wasn't quite sure how to ease out of it yet.

Once the tone of Sachiko's voice had had its effect, though, Yumi couldn't help but suddenly wonder about her Onee-sama's exact words. "Greedy?" Yumi mumbled. She looked up at Sachiko as the older woman stepped out from the shadow of the gate. She seemed to be staring up towards the peak of the hill from which Sei had descended.

Yumi twisted her neck and followed Sachiko's gaze. She could just barely make out the shape of Katou Kei, who appeared to be staring into space—or perhaps deliberately looking away. Yumi couldn't understand the connection.

"Indeed, this was rather greedy of me. My apologies," Sei said in her usual smirking tone. She gestured towards Yumi with a sweep of her right hand. Her left hand was still pressed defiantly against Yumi's face. "Did you want to do the honors instead, Sachiko?"

"Continue speaking such nonsense, and I will think twice about leaving Yumi alone with Sei-sama again," Sachiko said, but there was an odd gleam in her eye. Yumi was surprised to see the shadow of an amused smile. "I trust that a senpai with such a good reputation would know better than to teach my _imouto_ to engage in public displays of affection."

"She's learned that very well on her own," Sei said, and right away Yumi felt blood rushing to her cheeks.

Again, Sachiko's gaze seemed to fall very pointedly at the top of the hill where Katou-san sat. "What if she had seen you, Sei-sama?"

Sei cocked her head to the side and was quiet for a short moment. "Ah," she replied, glancing at Yumi with concern. "You're right. Very true. My mistake, my mistake."

Sachiko nodded in apparent acceptance, though Yumi still could not piece together what they were talking about. Her Onee-sama turned towards the street that sat beyond the school. "There's a car waiting for us at the corner. Shall we go?"

At first, Yumi thought that Sachiko had been addressing her, as they had already planned to spend the evening together. To her surprise, though, she found that Sachiko was looking directly at Sei, a question written in her expression.

"I have somewhere to be tonight," Sei replied.

This time Sachiko smiled; it was a small, conspiratory smile that Yumi could not interpret at all. "Then let us take you, Sei-sama."

Sachiko allowed Sei to grasp Yumi's hand without objection, and the three of them crossed beneath the gates to reach the outside world. Yumi raised her head up to watch Sei's face as they passed street lamp after street lamp, the light fading in and out on their way down the block, Sei's features transforming as they moved along.

Sei's eyes were still clear with deliberate intention, as they always were—but she looked a bit too serene, too relaxed with just a hint of tension beneath the muscles of her face. It was like she was holding onto a last reserve of energy that she was waiting patiently to unleash somewhere, on someone.

For a brief flash, Yumi hoped that it would be her. She imagined Sei pushing her hard against the bed once again—or the wall, or the floor—and pressing a warm mouth to Yumi's neck. The thought filled her belly with enough fire that she felt momentarily embarrassed to be standing so close to her Onee-sama while thinking such things about someone else.

She shook her head quickly. No, she thought, it was time to let those patterns go. She was a grown woman, and she had already spent the night with Sei once, with no shame, with no need to apologize to anyone, with no desire to run to the chapel with a rosary in her hand to ask Maria-sama for forgiveness.

Smoke from the idling car hit Yumi in the face and brought her attention back to the dim sidewalk where they all stood together. When the driver opened the door near the back, Sachiko gestured courteously for Sei to go in first.

But when Yumi moved to slide in after her, Sachiko pressed a hand to her shoulder, and gave her a rather pointed look. "Yumi, I will go first," she said, leaving no room for negotiation. She stepped into the car and ducked her head, slipping into the middle seat.

She would let Yumi walk with Sei, but Sachiko appeared to have no intention of letting them sit beside each other. _Maybe this is the wisest choice_ , Yumi thought, in spite of the frustration she felt underneath her self-control. She couldn't be certain what the reasoning was, but obviously Sachiko had now directly seen them together in a way that she hadn't before. Interestingly, Sachiko didn't seem exactly bothered by it— _concerned_ was more the word.

The driver closed the door after Yumi crawled inside, and before long the hum of the idling engine grew slightly louder, and the crunching sound of tires kicking up loose asphalt emerged from below them. There was a little light overhead, so that the compartment wasn't completely dark, but it was dark enough for the driver to see the road clearly, for the windows to have lost their mirrored effect.

Yumi looked over at the two women who sat across from her. They were huddled a little closer together than Yumi expected and they were murmuring to each other in the corner. To her mild shock, she noticed that Sachiko's hand had fallen lightly on top of Sei's. She had a sympathetic look on her face.

"It's here," Sei said, loud enough for Yumi to catch it. Sei passed what looked like a business card over to Sachiko, who took it delicately between two fingers, apparently careful not to smudge the glossy gold lettering that was etched across it.

"Ah, yes, I thought so," Sachiko replied, nodding her head. "This hotel has a very popular restaurant that works quite well for these kinds of occasions. You may have trouble getting in without a reservation, Sei-sama."

"Oh, you think so?" she asked, though her voice sounded completely unconcerned as usual. "I guess I'll have to sneak in, then. Or maybe I can crash someone else's reservation. 'Satou' is a very common name, after all."

Sachiko raised an eyebrow. "To be perfectly honest, I strongly suggest against that. Wouldn't that risk drawing undue attention to yourself, Sei-sama? If they discovered the situation immediately and threw you out, wouldn't that defeat the purpose of coming in unnoticed? To begin with, you're not exactly properly dressed for such a place, either."

Yumi looked back and forth between them, growing increasingly confused. Finally, when Sei had paused to consider what Sachiko told her, Yumi figured she had found an opening and raised her hand. At first, they ignored her, so she wiggled it a bit with frustration.

"Excuse me," she said, "but what are we talking about here?"

Sei turned to Yumi, leaning forward to look past Sachiko. "Oh," she said dismissively, with a smile, "I'm on my way to an _omiai_."

"O-omi—," Yumi stuttered. She could feel Sachiko's disapproving stare from the corner of her eye, but she ignored it and met Sei's gaze. She couldn't form the words to ask the question—or rather, the hundreds of questions—that played through her mind in that instant, but Sei seemed to understand nonetheless.

"Don't worry, Yumi-chan, the _omiai_ is not for me," she quickly replied, giving her a wink. "You'll know when I'm having one because you'll be sitting across from me, right?"

Yumi blushed at exactly the same time that her Onee-sama threw Sei a sour look.

"I would appreciate it very much if Sei-sama did not toy with Yumi like this," Sachiko said.

At this, Sei seemed to become thoughtful, scratching her chin reflexively. "Hmm, you might have a point there. When I used to say things like that before, it didn't have to mean anything. Now, though, it's a little dangerous to imply something like that to Yumi-chan, isn't it?"

"Sei-sama should not make promises that she does not intend to keep. That is all," Sachiko grumbled.

Sei grinned, nodding deeply in what seemed like a small bow of apology. "I shall not, I shall not."

Yumi stared at the both of them with fascination. She wasn't quite sure if she had understood correctly at first, but when she looked carefully at her Onee-sama's face, at the expression of warning that she was throwing Sei, she figured that her inklings were probably mostly correct.

Somehow, Sachiko knew about them. For how long, she wasn't sure, but in spite of her apparent misgivings, the air around her was not one of disapproval. Yumi knew her Onee-sama well enough to realize that she was actually happy with Yumi's choice. After all, it was Sachiko who had gently nudged her in Sei's direction the week before. However, she also knew that Sachiko had no intention of dropping the role of "protective older sister," even if it was simply a game at this point.

Yumi smiled and leaned her head down until it rested on Sachiko's shoulder. When she looked up, at first Sachiko's face appeared surprised, but in a matter of seconds she returned her affectionate smile.

 _If Sei-sama_ _likes to push me to grow, likes to guide me to dangerous places_ , Yumi thought, _then Onee-sama is the warm cocoon that I can rest in._

Suddenly Yumi heard a pelting sound against the glass beside her. She opened her eyes, only then realizing that she had closed them. When she turned, she caught sight of a pair of droplets hitting the window, then three or four more, and then suddenly hundreds. They hit hard, like falling pebbles, or like an array of tiny fingers that were knocking on her window and trying to get her attention.

She stared out into the night, at the few figures that she could make out on the side of the road, sparse groupings of people with mushroom-shaped umbrellas sprouting overhead. She wasn't sure how long she had been sitting in a daze.

"It seems there is no other way," Yumi heard Sachiko whispering beside her. "Unless one calls days or weeks ahead of time, they are always quite full—with certain exceptions. _I_ will have to call right now and make a reservation tonight for Ogasawara."

Yumi's eyes widened, but she faced away from Sachiko, so she did not feel the need to censor her expression. The Ogasawara name was powerful, powerful enough to bypass any petty rules, powerful enough to instantly clear a table at a very full hotel restaurant, but her Onee-sama was never one to flex this power too frequently. She wondered what this whole ordeal was about.

"Well, I'm honored to be adopted into the Ogasawara family for the night," Sei whispered back. Her tone was as it always was—casual and lightly amused—but Yumi knew that this was Sei's strange way of saying thank you.

As the car slicked through the hazy streets, Yumi looked at the two women who sat beside her, whose lithe bodies rumbled passively with the tiny bumps along the road. She was pleased to find that they were smiling at each other.

* * *

The cuff of Alice's dress shirt stuck out a little—just a little—from the sleeves of her suit jacket. It was the recommended style for Western clothes of this kind. As she stared down at her left wrist, she couldn't help but think that the small strip of white fabric that sprouted out of her jacket was there to allow a peek at the expensive shirt underneath, which was otherwise completely obscured by her vest and tie.

Her mother had brought her to a tailor to have it all fitted perfectly. Even still, she couldn't shake the weird sensation that it didn't fit at all. The shirt felt too small somehow, like she could feel every centimeter of the seams pressing uncomfortably against the fledgling muscles of her chest and back. The jacket felt too big, like she was a little kid swimming in a sea of fabric that hung too loosely from her dainty frame.

And yet when she had looked in the mirror earlier, everything seemed to fit just fine—perfectly even. The young man in the mirror appeared sharp and attractive. For some reason, this dissonance made her more uncomfortable than the insistent itch of the wool collar of her jacket against the back of her neck.

Alice had discovered something else in the mirror that evening, too: a single, coarse black hair jutting out from the side of her upper lip. She had stared blankly at it for a few minutes, in some kind of surreal daze—then she had pressed it hard between her fingers and ripped it out. A few sprigs of peach fuzz came out with it as well, and she had cursed aloud to herself, wondering if those hairs would grow back thicker. A dot of blood had trickled out. She wondered how much more blood it would cost her if more of those hairs happened to appear.

For now she was sitting on her mother's couch, gazing at the floor and jiggling her legs nervously, trying to forget the ill-fitting costume that was making her sweat. Every time she managed to release some worry and let her mind go idle, though, her thoughts inevitably floated off in a more painful direction.

She could not stop thinking about Satou Sei. Even though they had only known each other for a short time, it seemed like everything in the house now reminded her of this charming stranger. When Alice sat at the low table in her room during the afternoon, she had unconsciously pictured Satou-san leaning across from her, flashing that irresistible smirk. When she would look out the window and at the front gate during the evenings, sometimes her mind would manufacture Satou's silhouette near the edge of the dim sidewalk. In the dead of night, as she lay alone in her bed, she had thought of Sei's tall, lean body pressed against her, and she had done things to herself that she was ashamed of in the morning.

None of these thoughts—neither the innocent ones, nor the more overtly carnal—had done anything to slake her desire. She wanted to see Satou-san again. The longer she spent without seeing her, the more she had started to wonder if the woman had been a mirage, if every moment they had spent together had just been part of some kind of elaborate escapist fantasy. She wanted to touch her again, to press her face against the muscles of Satou-san's chest and close her eyes to the world, even if just to prove to herself that it had all been real.

But there was a thick, looming, iron wall that blocked the path towards Satou-san, and she had no business pushing through it. Alice belonged in that house, as a piece of furniture, as a part of the décor—and she knew better than to become enamored with some tantalizing image that lived beyond it. Nothing beyond these walls was real; or, perhaps, it was best if she told herself that.

"Kintarou."

It was the sound her mother would make when trying to address her. For the first time, she felt the strange urge to correct her.

She didn't, though. Instead, she looked up, trying to keep her face as neutral as she could, trying not to broadcast any of her thoughts too openly.

"Yes, Mother," she managed to say. She did not, however, manage to answer in the tone of a question. This was mostly because she always seemed to know what her mother would say before she had even said it; it was like she had a tiny version of the woman in her brain always reminding her to sit up straight, to uncross her legs, to stiffen that limp wrist.

"Kintarou? What are you doing just sitting there? Are you ready?" she called out, standing near the edge of the foyer, slipping out of her indoor shoes. "If you don't hurry, we're going to run late—and what kind of impression would that make?"

"We have plenty of time. Isn't the _omiai_ not for another half hour?"

Her mother gave her an irritated glance. "What kind of attitude is that? We're going to be courteous to Sasaki-san. In spite of her poor health lately, she's making an effort to see you on schedule. If we were to arrive even a minute late, how would that make us look?"

Alice stood up, the well-fitting, ill-fitting suit adjusting with her movements, constricting her in new places and loosening in others. In particular, she felt the crotch of her trousers press a bit too tightly on the flesh underneath, reminding her of what was there, making her wince with embarrassment. Not long ago, that part of the suit had actually fit—until her mind had wandered over to Satou Sei.

* * *

The rain had subsided into a mild drizzle by the time they had reached the hotel. Yumi looked out the window at the looming building and her eyes immediately directed themselves to the top floor. It was the most striking part, the walls built from wide panels of glass and concrete and steel, the bright glow of the inside lights shining brilliantly into the night and bathing the parking lot. Hanging vines on metal trellises adorned the outside.

Sachiko seemed to notice the direction of her stare. "That's the restaurant up there, on the top floor," she murmured into her ear. "There's a balcony near the back that is very nice, but otherwise the atmosphere is stuffy. The people who go there are quite insufferable."

Yumi turned to look at Sachiko with surprise. As contrary as she could be sometimes, Sachiko rarely bad-mouthed a place so openly. She smiled at Yumi's expression and reached over to play with the collar of her shirt, a gesture that had survived long after the sailor uniform had disappeared from her life.

Yumi looked past Sachiko when she felt a sudden breeze and realized that Sei was opening the car door. Sei gave her a tiny smile, but otherwise seemed preoccupied as she began to step out.

"You can go to see her off if you wish," Sachiko said, as if she were reading Yumi's mind, "though I don't recommend entering the restaurant with her or getting involved at all. I know that you must be confused, but the _omiai_ is between Alice-san and a young woman from Lillian. Things are already a bit...complicated, and you know how Sei-sama can be so unpredictable."

Yumi's eyes widened briefly, but as she thought about it, it actually made total sense. More than anyone else, Sei had a talent for cornering people at just the right time and allowing no room for escape. Why would Sei approach Alice during some other, more appropriate moment? That would be too polite and courteous, wouldn't it?

She was briefly reminded of why she found Sei simultaneously attractive and frustrating. The two extremes were one indivisible whole. _She's either way too distant or she's right up in your face,_ Yumi thought. _Sometimes both at the same time._

Yumi reached for the handle of the car door and Sachiko nodded towards her with encouragement. "I will wait for you here. Don't linger for too long," she said. As Yumi began to slip through the crack in the door, Sachiko grabbed her by the wrist, then added, "And don't do anything that pleases Sei-sama."

They exchanged an amused look, and Yumi finally stepped out onto the curb. The rain was only a light mist now that left her exposed face and forearms a little colder than the rest of her. But the ground was still slick with the previous downpour.

Sei had come around from the other side of the car and seemed to know what she was doing without even asking. She took Yumi's hand and led her down the carpeted outside entrance, and then through the doors that were held open for them by a young man wearing white gloves.

As she always did whenever she took even the slightest step into her Onee-sama's world, she felt like an impostor—but no one seemed to stare at them or notice them much as they made their way through the lobby of the hotel. Maybe it was the fact that Sei walked with such confidence—as she always did, like she personally owned the place, like she belonged just the same anywhere on Earth as she did in her own house—that everyone seemed to silently welcome them without question.

Sei led her to the elevator, and Yumi breathed a sigh of relief when the doors rolled shut, like a pair of curtains closing off the outside world for just a moment and giving them a moment of privacy. As Sei mashed the button for the top floor, Yumi turned to look at her.

"So you're crashing Alice's party, huh?" Yumi asked. It was harder to smile than she had anticipated.

Sei was quiet for a moment, only staring at the lights near the top edge of the door as they dinged to indicate each passing level. When they had ascended halfway up, she finally turned, and Yumi was surprised to find that Sei had a slightly nervous look.

In spite of that, the undertone of a smirk still managed to spread on her face. "Actually," Sei admitted, "I don't know what I'm about to do. I have no idea, no plan. I'm just acting on raw instinct right now. I feel kind of stupid, to be honest."

Yumi stepped forward and pressed her face against Sei's chest. It was a hurried gesture, and she did it with such little warning that Sei had to lean back a bit to avoid stumbling. Within a matter of seconds, she felt a pair of warm arms surrounding her.

"I'll be okay, Yumi-chan," she said. "I'm an expert at doing stupid things."

When Yumi looked up at her, Sei stooped down, and Yumi allowed the kiss that followed. The tastes and smells of Satou Sei still had the same effect; her heart pounded in her chest more frantically than it had when they had snuck through the lobby.

They broke away just before the final ding of the final floor. Yumi looked at Sei, conveying her worry one last time.

The doors opened and a gush of air followed. Sei stepped out, turned to Yumi, and ducked her head down slightly in a little bow of gratitude. Then the doors slid closed once again, and the image of Satou Sei was replaced with a pair of shining metal panels that showed Yumi her own reflection.


	13. Chapter 13: A Marriage Arrangement

**Chapter 13:** **A Marriage Arrangement**

As promised, Onee-sama had been waiting for her. Even through the tinted windows and the mist that surrounded Yumi like a curtain, she could make out the shape of Sachiko's face and shoulders when she peered through the window. The driver—to whom she had apologized profusely—held his cap with one hand to keep it from blowing off in the wind and opened Yumi's door with the other.

The warm little cabin light gave Sachiko's skin a yellow glow, her usually pale complexion looking oddly grainy as well, like the low resolution of an old film. Yumi didn't linger and stare for long, though. She hurried into the car and was only slightly startled when she felt the door slamming behind her.

They pulled out of the parking lot and onto the main road, and all the while Sachiko said nothing. She glanced at Yumi and slid over to make more room, but otherwise the backseat immediately fell into a strangely heavy silence.

Yumi wasn't sure what it was exactly, but she was fairly certain that the silence was a response to something that needed badly to be said. It was not their usual comfortable pause, the kind that came when Sachiko would lean against the seat and nod off without warning. In fact, Sachiko looked rather alert, her body in a weirdly tense stance, almost as if she were about to stand up at any moment—but of course that was impossible; the car was already hissing down a busy road.

For whatever reason, though—perhaps after being subjected to the emotional roller coaster of the past few weeks—Yumi's patience had already worn thin. There was also something else, a bewildering question that she had been unable to let go of for awhile now.

She looked carefully at Sachiko, trying to meet her gaze. "Onee-sama," she said, "how did you know what Sei-sama was up to this whole time?"

When Yumi said this, Sachiko's body seemed to relax a little, and she seemed to snap out of some train of thought that had been occupying her. She smiled and turned to Yumi. "Why, isn't that already obvious? You yourself heard her tell me in the car where she needed to go." Sachiko said this with a glimmer in her eye, very clearly not intending for Yumi to believe her.

So Yumi didn't. "But...Onee-sama seemed to know that Sei-sama needed to go somewhere even before we left the school. Actually, Onee-sama knew all kinds of details about what Sei-sama was going to do, and I didn't hear Sei-sama explain any of that."

"Mmm," Sachiko said, putting a finger to her chin. "Very true. I wonder how I knew, then?"

If it had been Sei who was teasing her like this, Yumi would have smacked her arm, but since it was Sachiko, she limited herself to a mere roll of her eyes. " _Onee-sama_ ," she grumbled, her tone insistent.

Finally, Sachiko let out a very showy sigh of exasperation, though her smile had not faded. She reached over and fondled a lock of Yumi's loose hair. "Suguru-san advised me of what was going on the other day. He told me that he thought Sei-sama would have trouble getting inside the hotel, and asked me to find her tonight and let her borrow our name."

" _Our name,"_ Yumi repeated in her mind. She had almost allowed herself to forget: Kashiwagi would soon become an Ogasawara himself.

"By a rather interesting coincidence," Sachiko continued, "you and I ran into her at the entrance and so we didn't have to go to the trouble of seeking her out." She paused, and added in a lower, more pensive tone, "Then again, maybe those sorts of things aren't coincidences at all." Her voice trailed off, as if she had more to say.

Yumi shifted uncomfortably in her seat. This conversation brought up yet another awkward question, something that they had somehow danced around and avoided addressing. At first, Yumi had figured that it was none of her business, but after everything that had happened, she couldn't help but feel that it made up an integral part of Sachiko's story of late.

She had to know. She had to summon the courage to ask.

Yumi cleared her throat and couldn't stop herself from averting her eyes. "Sachiko-sama," she began.

Sachiko's eyes quickly flicked over to meet hers and she looked at Yumi with renewed attention.

"Why are you marrying Kashiwagi-san?" Yumi finally asked. She turned her gaze down towards the floor. "A few years ago, during a New Year's party, you broke off the engagement. I was there, remember? You even told your mother and father that you wouldn't marry him. Why would you promise yourself to him again after all of that?"

Sachiko stared at her blankly for a second. It appeared that she hadn't expected this exact line of questioning, but before long she began to slowly nod. "I suppose...that does require an explanation."

Yumi quickly waved her hands. "Onee-sama doesn't owe me any—"

"No," Sachiko interrupted her. "You are my long-time schoolmate, my _imouto_ , and quite frankly...my dearest friend in the world." Her cheeks turned a bit pink at this, but her face remained stern, determined. "You are basically family at this point. You, more than anyone, deserve an explanation."

Yumi said nothing. She waited. She reached out and put her hands on top of Sachiko's, their fingers sliding together in an unconscious caress.

This seemed to give Sachiko some jolt of energy. She looked at Yumi very directly. "The first reason—the most important one, even if it's the least mysterious—is that I love Suguru-san." When Yumi gave her an uneasy glance, Sachiko shook her head. "Yes, I know that he cannot romantically love a woman. I have accepted this, I think. It's enough of a reality in my mind that I can't see myself being tortured by it anymore. I love him, and he doesn't love me the same way—and that's perfectly fine."

Yumi nodded vaguely, though she was still rather confused. After all, Sachiko had loved Kashiwagi even years ago, but that didn't stop her from breaking the engagement.

"The second reason is less...pure," Sachiko said. This time it was her turn to look away in what seemed like embarrassment. She hesitated, but continued after a moment nonetheless, "Over time I discovered that I have certain things in common with Suguru-san, things that I cannot deny. Because of this, I came to realize that our marriage would work rather well. It would be difficult for me to marry another man, perhaps even unfair of me."

Upon hearing this, Yumi gave Sachiko a wide-eyed glance. Of course, she had already had a sort of inkling that Sachiko might have been interested in people who were not necessarily men, but she never thought that it was something that a high class _Oujo-sama_ would ever openly admit. Speaking openly about one's sexuality—whatever that may be—was unwholesome, after all.

Sachiko tilted her head to the side. "I'm sure you've had your suspicions, Yumi, especially after what happened between us." She squeezed Yumi's hands as she appeared to steel herself for what she would say next. She let out a deep sigh. "I am able to love both men and women. Of late, I've only been interested in women. It's not difficult to see why, even from just a practical perspective, since I have almost no motivation to make friends with any men."

Yumi gave her hands a squeeze in response. She looked up at Sachiko with a smile. "You know that I would never judge you for that, Onee-sama. You should have just told me sooner."

"That's...not all of it," Sachiko whispered suddenly. A pained look came over her face. "These desires that I've had, I haven't been...expressing them appropriately. When you suppress something, it still tries to find a way out, doesn't it? These feelings certainly did that for me."

"What are you saying?" Yumi asked, her eyebrows knotting in confusion.

Sachiko's gaze wandered around the cabin, another wave of hesitation seemingly coming over her. She looked over towards the driver, then back at Yumi. "It's a long story," she finally said. "Perhaps it's best if we discuss this somewhere a bit more private. We can go to my room straight away when we get back."

Yumi followed her gaze and stared at the driver. She doubted that he had heard or was even paying attention, since Sachiko had kept her voice rather low and the sound of the light rain hitting the car could have easily drowned it out. If the details of what she was about to convey really were that scandalous, though, Yumi couldn't help but agree.

She found herself nodding towards Sachiko in silent concession. Before long, they had pulled apart and were sitting side-by-side again, each staring ahead at the foggy nightscape that rushed towards them through the screen of the windshield.

After a few turns of the crunching tires, though, a thought erupted in Yumi's mind. She turned her head towards Sachiko.

"Onee-sama," she said, "this thing that you'd rather explain in private—does Sei-sama already know about it?"

Unexpectedly, a warm smile spread across Sachiko's face almost immediately. She looked at Yumi with what almost seemed like a touch of pride. "Very good. You've been catching onto things quickly lately."

Yumi blushed at the compliment, but she knew that Sachiko's assessment wasn't quite right. It wasn't that Yumi had grown any sharper, it was simply that she had stopped avoiding all of the important questions.

* * *

"Would Ogasawara-sama care for a glass of wine on the house?" the waiter asked, an immaculate white towelette rolled up in his hand, puffs of steam still emerging from the well-engineered folds. He was offering it to Sei. She took it on reflex, the warmth of the fabric giving a pleasant contrast to the chilly atmosphere inside the restaurant.

But even while she accepted the moist towel and rubbed it on her hands, she shook her head dismissively. "That won't be necessary," she told him. "Just the food will be fine."

The truth was that she needed to keep her wits about her. She wasn't a very experienced drinker yet, and even a glass of wine was enough to lightly dull her senses. Her new name had given her access to the tower, but approaching the princess was still a completely different story.

At first, she hadn't the faintest idea of where to look. The top floor of the building was much more expansive than it had seemed from the outside, and once she had walked into the restaurant, she realized that it was sliced up by a labyrinth of paper dividers and strategically-placed walls. This seemed to have been designed to give the patrons a sense of privacy in such a large space, but it made it so that Sei could not easily see the whole room from her table.

Just as she had begun to debate how she might explore such a maze inconspicuously, she spotted a set of alcoves near a far wall. They were built into the structure of the building, each little nook sporting a fancy archway with what seemed like hand-carved molding. They were arranged side-by-side, as close as prison cells, but with expensive satin curtains adorning the entrances.

The curtains were open on most of them, and Sei could see that there were tables large enough to host a small family inside each. Some were empty and some were occupied, but she could catch glimpses between the cracks in the drawn curtains if she looked closely enough, and she could see that some of the more smartly dressed patrons were sitting in these private booths.

At the furthest section away from her, though, there was one alcove whose curtains were drawn particularly tightly. She immediately became obsessed with it, staring hard at the overlapping creases of the satin, trying in vain to see through it.

 _There,_ Sei thought. There was no question in her mind. She wasn't sure how she knew, but she couldn't help but imagine the stiff hands of the Arisugawa mother ripping those curtains closed with a harsh deliberateness.

It was similar to what Sei had done—just the opposite. Briefly, she remembered pulling open the row of heavy coats in the dressing room backstage at Lillian and exposing Alice's nakedness. In the same way, it was as if Alice's mother had come up behind her and closed them again.

She watched, like a guard perched at bastion, waiting to sense any evidence of movement. She was so entranced that she barely heard the waiter mumbling his pleasantries, and she barely noticed when he finally laid her food in front of her. He did it so carefully that the porcelain made no sound against the glass of the table. She was too distracted to appreciate the luxury of it.

As he bowed in silence and slipped away, Sei began to lower her gaze, to take a quick glance at the steamed oysters and snails whose scent was wafting upwards to agitate the knot in her stomach. Just as she stooped down, though, the billowing of fabric caught her eye.

She snapped her head up. She saw the conspicuous curtain open. She caught a glimpse of the family inside—and luckily, by the sheer coincidence of her positioning, they seemed to have completely missed her presence and her shameless stare.

It was only a brief flash. The curtain was open for two or three seconds. She saw a beautiful young woman dressed in traditional kimono, her hair styled up in large, flowing curls that reminded Sei of the waves of a dark ocean. The complexity of that kind of look had always simultaneously confused her and aroused her, and for a second she imagined Alice wearing that traditional garb, her hair adorned with white flowers, her face made up with the finest of paints.

But Alice's beautiful face was bare. Her hair was slicked back in an awkward attempt to make her already short locks seem shorter. Her body was wrapped in the husk of a Western-style formal suit and tie. She looked boyish and uncomfortable and completely out of place.

Alice was sitting across from the other girl. She stared at her partner with a blank, non-living stare, her body subtly angled away from her mother, who sat next to her. The contrast between the two young women at the table took Sei aback, even for those short seconds that she saw them.

Then she realized why the curtain had briefly flapped open. Alice's hand slipped between the hanging pieces of fabric again and she began to stand up as she opened them, bowing dutifully and mumbling something to the table in her usual humble manner. She escaped the cell momentarily. She turned on her heel. The flap fell closed again.

Sei followed Alice with her eyes as the girl shuffled nervously through the restaurant. She knew the look on Alice's face. Even with the myriad of walls that hid the patrons from each other fairly well, she knew that Alice felt a million invisible eyes on her. It was the look of someone who wanted to crawl into a hole and cover it with a rock.

Sei swallowed hard. For the first time, she noticed that a bead of sweat had accumulated just behind her left shoulder and that it was only now dropping down her back, leaving a cold trail in its wake. She nearly shuddered.

 _Now,_ Sei thought. _It's now, or not at all._

She stood. She did it so clumsily that her thighs hit the table hard enough to rattle the plates. A few of the nearby patrons turned to look at her, but thankfully Alice was too far away to hear or notice.

Sei tossed the moist towel—which had now grown cold—onto the table with a plop. She turned, hesitated one last time, then sped along the aisle as quickly as she could without drawing too much attention to herself. She passed table after table, the gush of displaced air causing some of the table cloths to dance as she rushed by.

She lost Alice momentarily around a corner, but when she rounded it, she saw that the girl was headed straight for the men's lavatory. Sei raised an eyebrow.

 _Well, of course,_ Sei thought. _Where else would she go in this state?_

As the space between them shrank, though, the decision was growing ever more urgent. Sei looked around. They were in a hallway and no other patrons or servers were nearby. When she saw Alice pushing her way through the men's room door, she only slowed down for a moment, the socially conditioned forcefield managing to push her slightly back at first.

Still, it wasn't hard to fight against it. Before the door had even finished closing, Sei had slipped in behind her.

Alice still hadn't noticed her. The girl covered her face, her body deflating in a loud sigh that sounded like a sob. She went straight for one of the stalls, but as she moved to close it, Sei swallowed a huge breath, as if she were absorbing her courage from the air itself.

Sei came up behind Alice and slammed her hand against the stall door, so that it reopened immediately.

Alice spun around in a panic, completely startled, but before she could say anything, Sei smacked her hand over Alice's mouth to keep her from crying out. She pushed her deeper into the stall and closed the door behind them, flicking the lock shut.

"Shhhh!" she said to Alice before uncovering her mouth again. Alice hadn't even said anything yet, but Sei knew what the makings of a scream looked like even before the inevitable explosion. After all, she had made a few girls scream in her day.

To her surprise, Alice pushed her back, and rather vigorously, with more than a small dose of anger.

"What are you _doing_ here, Satou-san?" Alice said, her tone hard, but her voice subdued to avoid making too much noise. It came off as a hissing whisper. "Are you trying to scare me half to death?" The edge of Alice's fist connected with Sei's shoulder. She batted away Sei's hands when Sei tried to reach for her with confusion. "Who told you I was here? Have you come here to watch me?" she rambled. "Have you come to see my like this? Have you—" Then her hands were on her own face again. A choked sob emerged, but Alice's face was dry from what Sei could see.

Sei grabbed Alice's wrists and ripped both her hands away from her face. "Look at me," she said. "Alice, I need to...I need to tell you…."

Alice's breathing had slowed. Her body seemed to melt slightly, to become looser near her shackled wrists. She looked up at Sei, her face a naked mixture of frustration and helplessness—and something else, a look that Sei had seen a few times before now. It was a look that made Sei lose all sense.

She dipped her head down at the same time that Alice stretched upwards. Her hands still clasped tightly against the girl's wrists, they kissed desperately, hungrily, without much regard to the volume of their ragged breaths or their loud shuffling.

Sei let go of Alice's arms only to reach up and take hold of her face. She kissed her hard and pushed her roughly against the stall wall, an angry metallic echo ringing through the room. Alice responded by biting Sei's lip with a deliberate, but not unpleasant, ferocity. Instead of pulling back from the pain, Sei groaned and deepened the kiss, intruded further into Alice's mouth.

She was getting carried away much too quickly. She knew it, but she couldn't stop. She was pressing a thigh between Alice's legs and she had taken hold of Alice's hand to direct it towards a more intimate place when the sound of a creaking door and a swoosh of air reached them.

They both froze. Sei leaned back slightly, her hand falling over Alice's mouth once again, since the girl's breaths had become particularly loud. Sei listened carefully as a set of footfalls bounded casually through the room, coming towards them, and then passing them, and then ending near a stall quite a few places away from where they stood.

Sei let out a silent breath. She let go of Alice and looked down at the floor with some concern. These were Western-style toilets, so the stall dividers did not reach all the way to the ground. It was already a miracle that there had been no bathroom attendant to observe them, but it was only a matter of time before an employee would notice the extra set of feet in the single stall.

She stared at Alice and tried hard not to let nature overtake her again. She tried hard to ignore the blush that colored the girl's cheeks, the harsh red that had tinted Alice's already attractive lips.

"We can't do this here," Sei whispered as quietly as she could.

Alice shook her head. "Sei-san," she murmured back to her, pressing her hands against Sei's chest, "we can't do this _anywhere_. You can't be here. You have to leave. I can't—"

"Talk to me." Sei turned and looked between the cracks of the stall door, out towards the sinks. She tried to catch a glimpse of the exit through the reflection in the mirrors. "Give me five minutes. They won't notice that you're gone." She turned back to Alice without waiting for a confirmation. "Where in this place are there the least people—besides here, obviously?"

Alice began to shrug, but then stopped. "The balcony," she said. "It was raining earlier tonight, so all the tables are soaked and no one wants to sit out there."

"Perfect," Sei said. She looked over her shoulder through the crack between the hinges of the stall door again, her gaze trained on the compartment that the other patron had disappeared into. "I'll leave first; it's less conspicuous. Meet me out on the balcony."

She didn't give Alice a chance to object. She unlatched the door and slipped out as quickly as she could, relieved when she found that the small hallway outside of the men's room was still mostly empty. Only a single waiter was walking by, and he didn't seem to notice that she had exited from the wrong version of the lavatory.

As she sauntered back into the main room, her eyes scanned quickly for this mythical balcony. She had actually not seen it when she walked into the restaurant, so she had no idea where it was. It seemed a little too late to ask about it as well, at least not without getting into some sort of discussion as to why she wanted to sit on a sopping wet iron chair on a cold spring night.

She had almost walked back to her table, to get her bearings, when she noticed the tall, wide glass panels that led to the outside. It confused her entirely that she hadn't noticed them before—but perhaps that was because the exit to the balcony was sitting not far from the private alcove from which Alice had emerged. In her fixation to see who was inside, she had completely missed the surroundings earlier.

Before another employee could accost her with any other attempts at service, she turned quickly and made a beeline for the elegant glass doors that she could see in the distance. She found it ironic that this was the most private place that Alice could suggest—after all, it was quite exposed from both the inside and the outside, a place of nearly complete transparency to the world. The only advantage was that because the lights were so bright in the restaurant, the spreading glass of the windows had become more like mirrors, so it was hard to make out exactly who was sitting outside.

Passing by Alice's table was particularly disturbing. She could barely hear some of the murmurs coming from inside, and she recognized a few of the voices. She side-stepped the area as best she could, as if some noxious smell were pushing her away.

When Sei made it through the glass doors unnoticed and she found that there were indeed no other patrons in the outdoor space, she breathed a sigh of relief. There was a small awning over one section that had protected a few tables from a direct hit of rain, and so she chose one of the chairs to sit.

Her body felt like it wanted to slump into the chair, out of sheer exhaustion, but her mind was keeping her wound up. She sat up stiffly. She put her elbows on the table and laced her fingers together. Her leg began bouncing up and down against her conscious choice.

Some seconds passed. Then minutes. For a flash, she felt a harsh, scraping feeling in the pit of her stomach. It was that cold emptiness—not unlike a hunger, but deeper—that she had felt at the train station five years before on Christmas Eve. A creeping sense of abandonment began to fill her. She felt herself begin to push her chair out, her legs swinging over so that she could jump out.

And that's when she saw it. It was almost like the outer world had been suspended for a moment and she could see the inner one more clearly. She suddenly could hear nothing except for her own breath in her ears.

She was very, very conscious of the fact that she wanted to run. She wanted to get up, to slip through the doors, to dash across the restaurant and dive into the elevator. She wanted to ride it down until she was buried in the depths of the basement.

 _I can't handle it._

It was a thought that rushed through her mind against her will.

 _I can't handle it. I can't do this again. I can't wait here again, for hours, for days, for years, for someone who will never come._

She felt her legs straightening, as if to push her out of the chair.

 _I can just remember that face, that last look I got of her pretty face, and that will be enough. The memory will be enough. It's so much nicer to think of what could have been than of what is._

She began to rise. Her hand grasped the armrest of the chair shakily.

Then she fell back down, hard, the thick metal of the backrest slamming against her spine. She winced. She felt an energy stewing deep in the small of her back, and the rattling of her bones only seemed to awaken it more.

She grasped the armrests again, but this time firmly.

"No," Sei said out loud. "I'm _here_."

And that was it. She stayed put.

Sei closed her eyes. It felt like ages had passed. She still felt the gnawing fear inside of her that Alice would never show up, that she had gone home, that she had disappeared off the face of the earth. She felt the fear, but she accepted it anyway.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew that it had only been a few minutes, though. The door to the balcony gave a polite creak soon enough. She opened her eyes to find Alice standing bashfully near the entrance, rubbing her left arm with her hand.

Sei swallowed hard and cleared her throat, trying not to broadcast her earlier uncertainty too loudly. She tipped her head towards Alice and gestured for her to come.

Alice cautiously moved closer, with the same deliberate slowness that one uses when tentatively approaching a feral cat. Sei responded with an insistent look; she pointed at the chair in front of her.

"I can't stay long. I really can't," Alice said, her voice filled with genuine conflict. Sei ignored her plea and pointed again at the chair.

Finally, the girl obediently sat, but at first she would not meet her gaze.

"What did you want to talk about, Satou-san?" When Sei didn't answer right away, Alice seemed compelled to fill the silence: "I'm sorry, Satou-san," she blurted out. "I'm truly sorry. I don't know how to even begin to understand what happened between us these past few weeks, but...it just can't be. It's destined to fail. My family wants me to marry, and I'm just one person facing eons of tradition. Who am I to push against the rest of the world? And who are you, for that matter?" Alice appeared to grit her teeth. "What we have...whatever that is...it has no future, Satou-san. It only exists in the present, and what kind of a life is that?"

Sei stared at her. Her mind was blank. She only sat there and absorbed Alice's face with sharply focused eyes. There was something about the experience that she had had just before Alice came out to see her, something that had momentarily turned her into some kind of creature that existed solely to listen. Her fidgeting had stopped. She was completely still. She waited.

" _Please_ understand, Satou-san." Alice's voice was wavering. "I need to do what's best for me."

Sei realized vaguely that she was being rejected. _In this moment,_ she thought, _Alice doesn't want me._ The pain hit her for a few seconds, but she didn't suffer much from it, to her shock. The fear subsided. The thing she had resisted just happened, so there was nothing to fight against anymore.

A silence yawned between them. Sei noticed then that it was her turn to talk.

She didn't think about what she was going to say at all. It just came out: "You're right," she said to Alice. The girl noticeably sprung back a little, seemingly surprised at the curt answer. Nonetheless, Sei continued, "You'll be better off with that girl who is sitting inside, waiting for you right now. She's very beautiful, and she'll have beautiful children for you. Even if you can't muster up the will to do what needs to be done for that to happen, I'm sure she'll have plenty of other lovers lined up to do the job for you. She'll be discreet about it, too, and she'll preserve your good name. She'll allow you to live a normal life."

Alice stared at her, appalled into complete silence. She seemed to open her mouth nervously to respond, but instead she simply closed it again with a confused look on her face.

"On the other hand," Sei said, when that moment had passed and she saw that Alice had understood her perfectly. "I'm not discreet. I will do nothing behind your back. I live openly, and obviously, and embarrassingly, to the very last ounce of my being. I actually have a girlfriend right now—or something like that—and I have no intention of leaving her for you. You would have to live with the fact that I see other women and that I don't care if you know. In fact, I would _want_ you to know. I wouldn't hide it even if you told me to. I would rip the veil from your eyes if you tried to pretend."

"Satou-san…!" Alice was the one fidgeting now. Her eyes were wide and she was gripping the edge of the table hard, her knuckles locking. "What are you talking about?"

But by the alarm on her face, Sei knew again that Alice had understood. "I'm not going to say that I can make you very happy, because I don't think that's true. Nothing I do will ever make you happy, but neither will anything anyone else does. I would make it hard for you to hide from yourself, though—which could potentially either make you very happy, or very miserable. There would be no pretenses about what we are and what this is, which would mean that others would definitely notice who you are. I'm not going to help you put on a costume. I'm not keen on a white wedding, so you can forget about that. I will not allow you to play groom, so you'll get no help from me there, either. I also have no intention of producing any heirs, so even that part of the facade would be off the table. For all intents and purposes, choosing me would be a raw deal and I don't recommend it."

" _Satou-san,_ " Alice repeated. She had already begun to push her chair back in a panic, but it was also clear that she could not pull her stare away from Sei. Her eyes were filled with a deep, curious interest, a resistance to that interest, and an overwhelming terror. "Satou-san, _what are you saying_?" she pleaded one last time.

Then it was Sei this time who understood more clearly than before. She understood the tone underneath the words, the tone that was begging her to offer a merciful way out.

But Sei had never been the merciful type.

"Isn't it obvious?" Sei said finally, before she even fully knew the answer herself. As she had half-expected, though, it came to her. Everything clicked, and she suddenly knew exactly what she had called Alice out there for. "I'm asking you to marry me, Alice."

The girl stood up, the subtle terror from before spreading over her face in a naked display. Slowly, however, in a matter of seconds, it began to melt into something else, to transform. Before long, Sei could recognize the tight lines at the edges of Alice's eyes and mouth, could sense the fury that was emerging from some unnameable place.

Alice slammed her hands against the table. "Who do you think you are, Satou?" she shouted. "You can't treat people like this! You can't saunter into somebody's life uninvited and ask for something so ridiculous and expect them to say yes! Does _no one_ on the face of the earth ever say no to you? Has it gotten to the point where you have the nerve to just walk all over people like this? What do you take me for? Do you really think I have no dignity at all? I don't even know you!" Her voice broke suddenly, but the anger still raged. "You shouldn't toy with people like this, Sei." She covered her face with her hands.

For the first time in awhile, Sei moved. She leaned over the table, her arm reaching over towards Alice's side, though she couldn't quite touch her. At this point, the girl had stood and taken a few tentative steps away.

" _I'm serious,_ Alice," Sei told her, though when she heard it echoing in her own ears, it had the effect of confirming her own intentions more than communicating them to anyone else. An odd, serene feeling washed over her.

She had put her raw self up in front of Alice. She had asked for the unacceptable. She was sitting there, entirely vulnerable, waiting for the blow of rejection. She was not only ready for it, but some morbid part of her wanted to experience every painful moment of it as completely as possible.

She wondered if Alice would have mercy on her and say no outright.

But before she could be the subject of another bout of the dainty girl's anger, the booming sound of vibrating glass broke through their sparring match and shattered their focus. Sei looked up to see a line of human figures queued up near the door, moving together as one amorphous ghostly presence. After blinking her eyes a few more times, she could make our their individuality.

There was a waiter, looking entirely confused. There were a few other people who looked the same—perhaps in Alice's party—but Sei's eyes quickly filtered past them with disinterest. Alice's father was the most expressive. He had a look of complete shock, his mouth hanging open, his eyebrows stretching high towards the top of his wide forehead. His wife was standing right beside him, her face similarly shocked, but it was definitely colored with the harshness of intense rage. She looked so furious that her jaw was visibly clenched and shaking with the words that she obviously wouldn't allow herself to scream in public.

Then the woman's hand came up to point squarely at Sei in some silent accusation. Alice looked back and forth between Sei and their growing audience with abject terror.

For the moment, Sei ignored them and locked her gaze on Alice. "Tell me no," she said.

Alice's breath hitched. She threw Sei a perplexed look, but underneath it there was still that thread of understanding that had run throughout the whole of their conversation.

"Tell me no, Alice," she repeated.

After a few more seconds with no response, she could no longer ignore the increasingly restless energy of the group that was now surrounding them.

"Good evening everyone," Sei called out. "Pardon us for the disturbance. It seems our spat became a little too heated." She stood up and bowed politely. She met eyes with the girl who was standing in the back, the girl who looked both weary and beautiful in her immaculate makeup and kimono. "My apologies," Sei said to her, "but I'm afraid that you cannot marry Arisugawa. You see, Arisugawa is already betrothed to someone else."

Alice's mother lowered her hand and instead stared at Sei in angry confusion. " _To whom?_ "

"To me."

Then the Arisugawa mother pushed past the line of astonished bystanders, her body jerking in Sei's direction.

And all chaos broke loose.


	14. Chapter 14: Mushrooms

**Chapter 14: Mushrooms**

It was all a blur, the bodies jostling around with foggy auras trailing behind them. For some reason, one sharp image stood out, though. A hand emerged from the mob and reached towards her, and she could see the dry wrinkles and world-worn knuckles in perfect detail.

At first she thought it was headed for her face, but it wasn't. The palm slapped against the side of her shoulder, the nails digging very lightly into her flesh. It grabbed a fistful of Sei's shirt sleeve and pulled with an intense jerk.

The woman wasn't that strong, the tug had not been that hard. It had just been so unexpected, that Sei nearly stumbled. Sei tried to adjust her eyes, to focus beyond the array of confused movement from the five or six people who surrounded them. She tried to look at the face of the woman who was in front of her.

She was a bit shocked when she saw a quick flash of pain, of uncertainty on that face. It had the effect of softening the usual stiffness. Once the woman noticed that Sei was staring directly at her, though, her face became stern again and that small crack of humanity had been shut behind an iron wall.

The woman was shouting something. Sei could barely parse the words over the sound of the people who were trying to talk over her in appeasing tones, trying to jump in and get between them. For another brief second of insanity as she stared into those furious eyes that reminded her a bit of Alice, Sei wondered if this woman was about to try to throw her off the balcony.

Instead, the lady made an apparent move to pull her through the throng of people. Her insistent tugging was futile at first, but the tenseness of her arm made Sei realize that she was using most of her strength. For some reason, this made Sei laugh out loud.

Predictably, this infuriated the woman more. She mashed the fabric of Sei's shirt between her fingers and hauled Sei toward her. This time, Sei took pity on her and followed, walking slightly slower than Alice's mother seemed to intend, as if she were a reluctant dog who hadn't yet taken well to the leash.

Alice's mother led her past the people, some of whom were reaching to separate them. Somehow, they both made it through the glass door still well-connected, but the woman could not ignore the audience around them. She called out to them over Sei's shoulder, grunting through some monologue that Sei was still unable to follow.

She was too distracted by the woman's face. The woman seemed to realize this, too, because she averted her eyes and would not look directly at Sei's intense stare. It was a stare that undressed her. Sei was smiling at her. Not insolently—genuinely. She was overcome with amusement. She was still laughing.

When Alice's mother had dragged her halfway into the restaurant—a whole entourage in tow— the adrenaline began to wear off and the rest of the world seemed to rush towards Sei and come back into focus. She could hear the words more clearly now. She had also noticed that Alice was conspicuously missing from the crowd.

"...and how did she even get in here?" Mother Arisugawa demanded, looking at the waiter with an accusatory stare, as if he personally had been the one to sneak her in, as if the restaurant were not open to the public. "Why was she allowed to just sequester my child the moment I looked away? She's a known troublemaker and I don't want her anywhere near my family!"

"Ma'am, please!" the employee cried. "Ma'am, I beg you, please let go of Ogasawara-sama!"

When he said this, her grip on Sei's shirt became noticeably looser, but she was still rushing Sei vaguely towards the front exit of the restaurant. "Ogasawara…?" Alice's mother said, then turned to look at Sei with disdain. Sei only responded with a grin and a shrug of her shoulders. "This is no member of the Ogasawara family! I know them quite well, and this intruder is not among them! This young woman is _Satou Sei_."

The tone she used when pronouncing her name seemed to imply that Sei was some kind of peasant. It was almost as if she had said, "This young woman is _merely_ Satou Sei." This only served to amuse Sei more. She found it even funnier that the lady had taken pains to mention that she was close to the Ogasawara clan, as if she couldn't resist the name-drop even through her anger.

"It's true," Sei said, her voice neutral, not too loud. Even so, because it was the first time they had heard her speak since the chaos ensued, everyone seemed to immediately turn to listen to her. "My apologies for the mix-up. My name is indeed Satou Sei. A friend of mind arranged the reservation for me." She turned to the waiter. "Unfortunately, it seems that my meal has been thoroughly interrupted. My own fault, really. Would it be terribly uncouth and low class to ask if I could take it home?" She glanced at Alice's mother suddenly, quite deliberately. "The oysters looked very tempting," she said to her, "but I don't care for snails much, to be honest."

Finally, a hand reached out and tightly grasped Arisugawa-okaa-san's fingers, ripping them away from Sei's sleeve in one sharp jerk. Sei looked over at the owner of the hand with surprise. She didn't recognize his face, but he was an older middle-aged man with a stern expression and he was standing beside the girl in the kimono. She guessed that it must have been the potential bride's father.

"That's enough, Arisugawa-san," he said, his voice gruff.

Sei had half-expected Alice's father to be the one to intervene, but when she turned towards him, he was merely staring at the two of them, still frozen in shock. Sei looked at Alice's mother one last time, offering an open, vulnerable stare, the kind that she gave when she was ready to listen to whatever someone had to say. Predictably, the woman's face twitched, almost as if Sei had just slapped her.

Still, she had no choice but to accept Sei's surrender. When the woman stepped back, Sei bowed towards the crowd in finality, both out of a sense of apology for causing the ruckus and also out of a sense of finishing some kind of performance. She figured that grabbing Alice's mother's hand and bowing together would be out of the question—she couldn't help but smile at the thought, though.

On her way back up, she glanced quickly over their heads to see if she could catch a glimpse of Alice somewhere, but there was nothing interesting to see.

Alice was gone. Sei couldn't even sense her presence anymore.

Saying nothing more—because she had grown disinterested with the situation, now that the queen's hysterics had dissipated and the princess had slipped away from her—she turned and headed towards the exit on her own. A collective murmur erupted behind her, and she wasn't sure if it was from her party or some of the other patrons.

A few waiters flanked her on her way out, offering rambling apologies, but she waved them off as she passed the host's counter. Forgetting all about her food, she stepped into the elevator and watched the doors sliding quickly shut, cutting her off from that strange world once again.

* * *

The curtains were very heavy, lined with what looked like an expensive velvet, and because of their deep red hue, they reminded Yumi a bit of the curtains on a stage. They blocked out the moonlight quite well. If Yumi hadn't been conscious of the time, she wouldn't have been able to tell if it was day or night.

The sheets on the bed matched the color of the curtains—by coincidence or deliberate design, she wasn't sure. They flowed like a red ocean over the curves of her body, though she noticed that the peaks and troughs of the waves were much more elegant and severe where the sheets wrapped around Sachiko. Her hips had always been more defined than Yumi's after all, her proportions enviable to most of the student population of Lillian.

Yumi had never envied Sachiko, though. Perhaps that was because she had never wanted to become her. She had only ever wanted to look at her, to admire her, to lose her sense of self and take in all the sights and smells of Ogasawara Sachiko. Perhaps this was why her Onee-sama had been drawn to her and had sensed her unusually pure intentions. Yumi was an appreciator of art, of walking human sculptures—and she could love them for exactly what they were, with no expectations. She had this in common with Satou Sei.

Yumi stared at her Onee-sama. Their eyes were locked. They had been sharing a gaze like this in silence for a few minutes, and neither of them had grown uncomfortable yet.

At some point during the night, all of the secrets had slipped out. Bit by bit, with little prompting, Sachiko had told her everything. With every new confidence shared, they had moved further into the bedroom. Eventually they had come to lay in the bed, to traverse the labyrinth made of those blood-red sheets together.

Yumi was wrapped like a caterpillar in a cocoon, only her head poking out from the blankets. Sachiko was a bit more relaxed, her shoulders and a single arm exposed above the sheet, her hand reaching over and caressing Yumi's face.

She slipped forward slightly. Yumi guessed her intentions and leaned in a little as well. When they kissed, it was a very light touch, very brief. It was chaste enough that it did not awaken any of Yumi's lower senses, but it did cause her heart to beat a little faster, as she was still unused to this kind of affection between them.

"I'm...relieved," Sachiko said all of a sudden, breaking the silence. She let out a sigh. "I'm relieved that even after all of this, you can accept me."

Yumi smiled at her warmly. "I am offended, Onee-sama," she said. When Sachiko cocked her head to the side, she explained, "How could Onee-sama think that I would judge her for that, even for a second?" She wriggled her arm out of her cocoon and reached up to take Sachiko's hand. She pressed it against her own cheek. "I told you before: I love you the way you are, Onee-sama. I can't pick and choose the parts of you that please me. It _all_ pleases me."

Sachiko's eyes had a shine to them and they looked like a pair of watery mirrors for a moment, but the drops did not spill over. When Yumi looked carefully, she could see the hazy image of her own reflection.

"I'm not going to lie. It was shocking at first to hear what you told me, but I am still your _imouto_ ," Yumi whispered, "and...other things as well."

Her Onee-sama's expression grew thoughtful in response. "We could never be...anything other than what we are, could we?" she said.

In any other context, what she said would have been confusing, but Yumi immediately understood. "Yes," she agreed, "our relationship is not like the one I have with Sei-sama. But then again, my relationship with Sei could never be what I have with you, either. They are both so different."

It was only the look of curiosity and mild surprise on Sachiko's face that made Yumi realize that she had dropped Sei's honorific momentarily. After a few seconds, though, Sachiko's expression changed to one of wistfulness. "I know that. I don't want us to be the same. I just want…."

"I care very much for you, Onee-sama," Yumi said, "but, no, we can't have that. It's just not the way things are."

She found it ironic that she was lying in bed with Sachiko—albeit fully clothed—telling her in not so many words that they could never have a sexual relationship. Their connection had always bordered on the romantic, ever since they first met, but reaching into the realm of physical intimacy and lust was another matter entirely. She had never lusted after Sachiko. It took lusting after someone else for her to realize that fully.

Sachiko nodded in complete acceptance. There was a bittersweet smile on her face, but Yumi could still notice some relief underneath. _It is what it is_ , her expression seemed to say—and "what it is" was not at all objectionable.

"Speaking of which," Sachiko murmured all of a sudden, pulling her hand away from Yumi and stretching her arms over her head in an oddly unladylike way. It was like she was squeezing the last bits of pent-up energy from her bones. "I wonder if everything went well for Sei-sama."

"I hope so," Yumi whispered, becoming a bit pensive as well. She looked over towards the window, as if to catch a glimpse of the outside world again, but then she remembered the curtains. "Thank you for helping her. That was very kind of you, Onee-sama."

Sachiko smiled broadly. "Of course," she said, as if she were surprised that Yumi even mentioned it. "She would have done the same for me, don't you think?" She paused, bringing her hand to her chin. "You know, Yumi, sometimes I feel that our culture has the wrong idea about human connections."

Yumi looked at her curiously. It was rare for Sachiko to launch into some kind of philosophical mood, so she couldn't help but lean in with a bit of interest. "What do you mean?"

"Well, we view relationships as things that happen between two people at a time. It's like a box with two people inside, or two people sitting in a courtyard surrounded by brick walls. And then when you want to visit a connection with another person, you leave that courtyard and go to another one with someone else inside."

Yumi tilted her head and smiled, only half-understanding. "So should there be more than two people in a single courtyard?" Yumi asked.

"Ah, you see, it's not that there _should_ be—it's that there already are! The walls are made of fake rubber bricks, you see. Actually, there are no courtyards. We're all sitting in one gigantic, spreading garden. All of our relationships affect each other. For example, if it weren't for your connection with me, you would have never gotten to know Sei-sama—or, at least, it would have been very unlikely."

"...and if it weren't for my getting together with Sei-sama, then you and I wouldn't have become closer," Yumi said, nodding slowly. Her smile widened. "And if it weren't for your help and a small push from me, Sei-sama may have given up on Alice."

"Exactly," Sachiko said to her, quite pleased. "We live in a village, and no one is ever on his own. It's easy to forget that. _I_ forget that a lot." She gave Yumi an enigmatic smile. "But you're always there to remind me."

Not long after that, Yumi found her way through the sheets and closed the distance between them. She pressed her face to Sachiko's chest and was welcomed by the roaring sound of her Onee-sama's beating heart.

* * *

The glow from the lantern lights looked different this time, more organic, like the light from some bioluminescent beast floating around in an ocean. If only she could ease her way through like such a creature, seamlessly melting into the air and swimming the short distance across the garden to that heavy door.

The outer edge of the cage was stopping her, though. She stared up at the criss-crossing bars, wondering how slippery she would need to be to slide through that iron barrier. She stood very close to the gate, her eyes wandering along every aspect of the courtyard and garden inside, looking for some kind of solution, some tool that would help her solve this problem that had nagged her since she reached the house. To be truthful, it had actually troubled her from the very beginning, from the moment she had first set foot on this curb weeks before.

She continued to look, not entirely aimlessly, but open to any possibility. Near the foot of an overly-ornate bird bath, a patch of mushrooms caught Sei's eye. The glow from the lamps made them light up in a strange way, as if they had their own source of pulsing electricity. When she looked closely, she saw that they had a blueish tint to them, and she recognized their shape immediately.

She laughed to herself, quite freely, not even trying for a second to suppress the noise. She laughed because she found it so amusing that in this perfectly-designed, meticulously-manicured garden, a symbol of magic had still survived against the iron lady's will. Had Sei been on the other side of the gate, she may have been tempted eat them. She vaguely remembered that Eriko had once accused her of doing exactly that before attending a graduation ceremony years ago—but she hadn't; Sei was well aware that she was quite insane without any extra help.

Just then, a car slid by on the road behind her, and Sei looked over her shoulder in response. She didn't care if they found her. She wasn't even sure if they were home or not. She only wondered if Alice was with them, so that she could pull her aside and finish what they had started.

But the car continued speeding by, a cabin filled with people that Sei didn't recognize. She sighed.

When she turned back around, she was surprised to see that the front door to the house was open. At first, she had completely missed the sound of the light footfalls that now reached her ears. Her mouth dropped open in surprise and she pulled back a little as she saw the familiar figured approaching her in the dim light. She recognized the face immediately this time, with no delay.

"Ka...Kawakami?" Sei blurted out, genuinely taken off guard. "What are you doing here?"

For once, the girl did not seem pleased to see her. Her lips were pressed tightly together, as if she wanted to say something—perhaps loudly—but was holding back. After a moment, she bowed slightly. "Good evening, Senpai," she said. "I saw you from the upstairs window. You wouldn't go away, so after awhile I came down." She stopped right across from Sei, less than a meter from her, the iron bars of the gate separating them.

Sei looked at her for a long moment, studying her face. It seemed to hold many unspoken things. "I keeping forgetting that you're Arisugawa's cousin," Sei said.

"That's right," Kawakami replied immediately. "We're actually rather close. I'm over here fairly often."

"I've never seen you here."

"You never come in," she said, again responding rather quickly. "You usually just steal Alice away."

 _Alice._

"You know about…?"

"Everybody knows about that kid. She can't hide it even if she tries. Even when she wears a suit, it looks like she's in a dress. I don't know how she does it," Kawakami said. She smiled vaguely, then a frown slowly formed. "If I had known that you would have liked her so much, though, I would never have introduced you."

Sei let out a sigh. "Look, Kawakami, you and I—"

"Not because of that," Kawakami interrupted her. "I tried with you, and it didn't work. That's fine. There are no hard feelings." She waved her hand dismissively, and Sei was quite surprised. "It's because of her. You've turned her life upside down, do you know that? She hasn't been the same since she met you, and now you've even caused a rift between her and her family."

Sei felt her own face twitch. A heat rose up from her chest and into her throat. She shook her head slowly, but she knew that to a certain extent it was true. Sei left emotional destruction in her wake everywhere she went, and she wasn't sure how to stop—or even whether she wanted to—or even whether she _should_ stop.

Kawakami shook her head as well. "No," she said, seemingly correcting herself. "It wasn't all you. It's unfair to say that. You were more like the catalyst, but the mixture was already all there. Eventually, there would have been some blow up with or without you. You've only uncovered what Alice was hiding from her parents—you only gave her a reason to open it all up."

Sei set her eyes unwaveringly on Kawakami's face. Against her conscious will, Sei felt her body loosen, open up. She felt the last bits of hesitation, the last vestiges of her walls come down. "I…," Sei began. She swallowed. "I love—"

"I know," Kawakami said. She was smiling now. It was a look that was more warm and sympathetic than Sei thought she deserved—but she accepted the charity nonetheless.

She stared at Kawakami. Sei didn't want anything. She looked at her only to study the lines of her face, with no desires, no agenda, no need to convince her of anything.

So she found it a bit jarring when Kawakami abruptly looked away, to the side of the gate. The girl's hand reached for a small console that Sei hadn't noticed before. She slapped some button that Sei could barely make out in the darkness.

The gates suddenly began to creak open.

Sei gave Kawakami a surprised glance, one filled with questions. The girl seemed uninterested in answering, though. Kawakami stepped back to allow the gates to open fully, and when there was no longer a barrier separating them—or separating Sei from the garden—she turned quickly and started making her way back towards the door.

"They're not home yet," she said, not bothering to look over her shoulder at Sei. "They stopped by our grandfather's house on the way back. They're looking for Kintarou, and I told them he wasn't here; they're not sure where he went. I think they don't realize that he never existed in the first place. You can go up to Alice's room. She might be startled to see you, but at least you'll be able to finish what you started." She stopped in her tracks, right in front of the threshold to the house. "Satou-san?"

Sei had begun to follow her, her legs moving on their own, even in the midst of her astonishment. When she heard her name, she looked up to find Kawakami's back facing her. She paused at the bottom of the steps that led up to the house. "Yes?" she murmured.

"I'm not doing this for you," Kawakami said. "I'm only doing this because you are Yumi-san's friend. It's a gift for her through you, you might say. In fact, you can forget that I did this. Imagine instead that it was Yumi-san who opened that gate and led you through this door."

Once they had stepped inside and the oddly cool air of the house hit them, Kawakami slipped off her shoes and floated off into a hallway, disappearing without another word. Blinking a few times to make sure that she was fully awake and in the usual mundane reality, Sei wondered for a moment if she indeed had eaten those mushroom and had simply forgotten.

She decided to accept it all anyway, even if it might have been an elaborate hallucination. She was grateful for it nonetheless. She closed the front door behind her and pulled off her shoes, not bothering to put on the house slippers before she jogged through the living room and found the stairs.

The steps squeaked as she ascended. She felt her feet fall with deliberate effort every time. At the end of the long staircase, at the very top and towards the left, she could see the outline of a plain white door. Coming out through the cracks at every edge was a brilliant yellow light. She could almost feel it hitting her like a wave of heat.

When she reached the landing, she didn't hesitate. She grasped the doorknob tightly in her hand and pulled it open. A bath of warm light flowed out towards her. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust.

And there, like she had been casually drinking tea all night, oblivious to the conflicts of the outside world, sat Alice. She was at the low table and she looked up at Sei in shock, the teacup immediately shaking in her hand. Droplets spilled onto the book that was spread out in front of her. She dropped the cup onto the table.

There was more than surprise on her face, though. There was an edge of embarrassment as well. Sei looked up and saw that the girl's clothes were strewn about the room. Her suit jacket was crumpled near the door, with her dress shirt and vest in a heap close by. Her trousers looked like they had been tossed angrily at the wall, and they were presently hanging in a mess along the top of a small bookshelf.

The girl was quite naked. From her perspective, Sei could not see the rest of Alice below the line of the low table, but something told her that the girl had freed herself down to nothing.

Sei nodded, as a polite acknowledgement of the intrusion, but she nonetheless let herself in without invitation and gently closed the door after herself. She walked over to the low table and sat down. She briefly remembered with amusement how they had sat in these exact positions, the tray of tea between them, when they had met for the second time.

She hadn't known it at the time, but it was precisely in the midst of those awkward moments that she had decided that she liked Alice. She remembered them almost as vividly as their more pleasant moments, almost as vividly as that first kiss.

The shock hadn't worn off from Alice's face. Nonetheless, Sei couldn't wait any longer. She leaned in towards her, and for reasons that remained a mystery to Sei, Alice didn't have the good sense to lean away. Sei stopped just short of contact, their faces centimeters apart, their breaths mingling.

She purposefully had not looked down at first, but now she felt the desire tugging at her. She gave Alice a questioning stare and was a bit surprised when Alice nodded.

Sei looked. She tried to glance as briefly as she could at Alice's lower half, not wanting to stretch the discomfort longer than necessary, but she found that her eyes did linger for a few seconds longer than she had intended. She still wasn't quite sure what to make of it, what to call the shapes and lines of skin that she saw beneath her, but she found it all very beautiful.

She turned her gaze back up towards Alice. "You can look at me, too," Sei whispered. "Right now, if you want. I can show you all of me. I don't care."

Alice didn't answer. Her previously blank stare of astonishment cracked open. The tears flowed immediately, without warning, the first of the sobs racked her body. She pushed her face against Sei's chest and cried.

Sei pressed her mouth to the side of Alice's cheek. "I know you're only eighteen," she said, "so you can't legally marry without permission yet, but you'll be twenty soon enough—in what, a year and half? Two years? That's a sensible engagement period, don't you think?" Sei was smiling, because she was very conscious of her own insanity, because she knew that the length of engagement was just about the only sensible thing in the whole ordeal.

The rest of what she was asking was unreasonable. She was pushing Alice much too hard, much too quickly into a path of growth. She was only just a girl, after all, a bud that had some time left before she was ready to blossom fully.

But Sei couldn't help but wonder if the girl would ever grow at all under her present circumstances. Better to push too hard, than to never break out of the ground at all.

"I'm not trying to play with your feelings, Alice," Sei said. "I'll keep my word. I mean everything I've said. If you simply _must_ get married, then you will marry me. No one else suits you, and I can't watch you marry someone who'll push you back into your shell, someone who will give you an excuse to be something you're not, someone who won't challenge you to follow the life that's unfolding inside of you. She would make it way too easy for you."

Alice grabbed two handfuls of Sei's shirt and squeezed hard. Sei could feel the tension building and releasing in Alice's body with every breath, like some conflicted cycle that was nonetheless quite predictable.

She brought her hand to Alice's chin and tipped her head up until they faced each other. Streams of tears lined the girl's cheeks, but her body had stopped trembling the moment they met eyes. Sei tried her best to transfer something—strength, perhaps—through her gaze, but she knew that the courage to act was solely on Alice's shoulders now. There was nothing she could do for her anymore.

Sei offered Alice a light kiss on the mouth, which the girl did not resist. Then she stood from the table and wandered towards the door. Before she left, she turned her head slightly and called out to her, "You don't have to answer me right this instant, Alice—but I won't take 'maybe' for an answer."

She stepped out and shut the door behind her. The hallway where she stood was now shrouded in darkness, except for the small bit of radiating light that peaked through the cracks of the shell of Alice's room.

When Sei walked down the staircase, she was a little bit taken off guard—but not entirely surprised—to find that Mr. and Mrs. Arisugawa were at the foyer. They stared at her, similarly thrown off at the unexpected visitor, and they didn't respond at first when Sei had the audacity to wave at them and smile.

"Pardon for the intrusion," Sei called to them in a sing-songy voice. She didn't avoid them. She fearlessly made her way to the foyer, intending to put her shoes back on. She had nothing to hide anymore.

Alice's mother gave a delayed reaction. Like Sei had suspected all along, she was growing weary of this particular performance as well. Either way, she stepped forward and looked directly at Sei's face. "How dare you come here." Even while Sei was stepping down towards the shoe rack, obviously intending to leave, Arisugawa pointed towards the door. "Get out of my house this instant before I call the—"

"Oh, let it go already, _Chikko_ ," a clear voice rang out from behind the ornery woman. Sei would have snickered at the silly nickname if it wasn't for the fact that the interruption had given her pause.

She looked over and saw that Alice's father had put his arm out and was pushing the woman away from Sei.

"That kid of ours has never— _never_ —attracted a girl on his own. Isn't that why we were so worried in the first place? Now I find out that he's been having a secret affair, and not only is she a beautiful girl from Lillian of all places, but she's his own tutor? I honestly can't see why you have any objection. Let the kid find his own way, Chieko. I would say Satou-kun is more than a worthy suitor."

Arisugawa Chieko's body tensed one last time, as if she were about to jump forward, but then—rather suddenly—the energy seemed to leak from her bones and she slumped forward weakly. She looked up at Sei for the first time with a softened expression. It was a plea, a show of helplessness, of confusion. The creases that always lined her eyes and mouth were still there, but they were no longer tightened with suspicion. For whatever reason, a sliver of the mask had fallen.

"Do you...really intend to do this, Satou?" she asked, her voice a bit hoarse. She locked her gaze with Sei's. "Are you serious about this?"

"Yes," Sei replied immediately. She did not look away. "I love her."

Arisugawa Chieko winced. It was obviously not the answer that she had wanted, but she seemed to have no way of resisting Sei's troublesome sincerity. She merely nodded slowly, in something that appeared like grudging acceptance, though not quite agreement.

"I'm...not against it," Alice's father said.

Sei looked back and forth between the two of them, quite stunned. She managed to offer a humble bow before grabbing her shoes and practically sprinting to the door. The walls of the house felt confining in that moment. She felt like a wild beast in a cage. She wanted to run around outside through a field somewhere.

When the gush of fresh spring air hit her as she opened the door, she felt grateful for even the small bugs that zipped around her when she stepped into the moonlight. She walked across the garden, crunching the grass beneath her feet. She paused for a second near the bird bath, near the family of glowing mushrooms, but soon enough she felt that familiar wild energy flowing through her again and she rushed towards the entrance.

She was pleased to find that the gate was still open, that there was no barrier when she skipped across the last patch of grass and jumped triumphantly into the outside world.

* * *

Alice sat still, very still. She strained to hear the last vibrations of that young woman's footsteps, of the front door to the house slamming closed with her particular brand of energy. Alice was tempted to look out the window and see if she could catch one last glimpse of that woman, but she found that her legs wouldn't move.

So instead, she sat, her eyes staring straight at her teacup, her vision un-focusing and refocusing. When she looked closely, she could still see a few translucent particles in the bottom of the cup. For the first time in a long time, she had taken her tea with some sugar.

The room felt oddly cool, and her drink was now quite tepid, but for some reason she felt a pulsing warmth burning softly in her chest. It grew and shrank with her breath, like she was stoking a fire inside of her.

 _She loves me._

Alice had barely heard the murmurs floating up from down the stairs. At first, she had been afraid, had felt her body lock up when she realized that Sei had been caught. Then she had heard the the gist of the conversation as subtle whispers against the walls of her room. She had suffered through most of it, both embarrassed at the whole evening's ordeal and still quite angry at Sei's audacity—but then….

She lifted her hand with some effort. She dipped her finger in her tea and watched the ripples, as if she were looking to decipher her future in a bowl of water. Even if she had wanted to know, though, she could see nothing.

Just hours before, she had been presented with a very predictable vision of what her life could be like ten or twenty years down the line. It wasn't an intolerable vision. It was only as intolerable as the clothes that she had ripped off her body and thrown around the room the moment she had had the chance. But as much as she hated them, she hated to look at her own body more, so soon enough she knew that she would be putting them back on.

In some ways, it helped to be able to look away from herself sometimes, to cover her real self up. The distraction was soothing in certain respects. It was a distraction that no one in her life resisted, either; it was a cocoon of safety that everyone seemed to encourage her to crawl into.

Except for Satou Sei.

There was this presumptuous person who had come out of nowhere and mercilessly pointed to everything that Alice used to distract herself. She would not permit Alice to hide. Sei would permit almost anything from anyone, it seemed—except for that. It was the most frustrating thing about her, too: When Sei would look at her, Alice felt like the woman was seeing through hundreds of layers of baggage, like every part of Alice except her very core had become invisible. None of the usual costumes had worked on Sei; she had laughed when Alice tried to play _Kintarou_ , had immediately pointed to it with no ounce of discretion.

She could strip Alice of her defenses with just a glance, and Alice had shuddered nakedly against that stare more than once. She had felt it the first night they met. Sei could see even the person beneath the name _Alice_. This was what scared Alice the most. But Sei wanted nothing else from her.

And so she couldn't shake that bittersweet tightening in her chest when Sei's words had reached her. They echoed in her head.

" _I love her."_

Sei's confident voice had radiated through the house like a tiny spark of light. Alice knew the full gravity of what that had meant. Sei loved _the real her_. While the words had filled her chest with emotion, not all of it was pleasant. A deep discomfort had come over her. Sei's words weren't just a declaration of love; they may as well have been a challenge. Alice wasn't sure if she could live up to it.

A future with Satou Sei was a huge unknown, a blank slate in her mind. This was not only because Sei was unpredictable, but because Sei demanded that Alice explore parts of herself that were still a complete mystery to her. It was something that was simultaneously terrifying and seductive, and she didn't know yet if she wanted to take those kinds of risks. When she had spent time with Sei, she had thought that she was getting to know some strange woman with a foreign-looking face, but in reality Sei had been pushing her to get to know her own self the whole time. No one had ever done that for her before.

Alice let out a breath. She sat, still paralyzed for the most part. She knew what she _should_ do by sensible standards, and she knew what she _wanted_ to do by her own irrational instinct, but she still could not piece together what she was _going_ to do. Even as she heard the faint thumping of footsteps in the back of her mind, she did not move, did not let go of the rushing train of thoughts.

A cool breeze of air hit her body. She was getting used to the exposure by now, though, so she didn't shiver from it. Instead, she merely looked up.

Her mother had appeared in the doorway. Her posture looked as if she had been about to step into the room, but something had stopped her dead in her tracks. Her usually stern and scrutinizing face was instead colored with shock, and her eyes seemed to scan across every article of clothing strewn about—and then finally, across Alice herself.

Her mother's eyes widened with realization. "Kin...Kintarou? Are you…not dressed?" She took a step back, but did not retreat much more, as if she were torn between shielding her eyes from the scene or interrogating further. Her glance briefly shot towards the stairs, as if she were looking for some figure that was no longer there, then her attention quickly came back into the room. The usual stern gaze had returned. "What on Earth was _that girl_ doing to you in here, Kintarou? Did she—?" her mother began, an icy voice emerging from somewhere deep in her chest.

But Alice interrupted her. "Yes, Mother, she did." The words seemed to leave her mouth of their own accord. The tone was what made it worse, though. She had said it so insolently—with the same quality as one of Sei's little smirks—that she almost regretted it immediately. It made her want to cover her mouth and apologize, but for some reason, she found that she couldn't.

Alice's mother stared at her. "You get dressed this instant. This instant! And I never want to see that girl—"

"I can't get dressed, Mom," Alice said. She felt a strange energy growing inside her. It was an energy that felt very familiar, like it had always been there, but something had snapped and allowed it to flow freely all of a sudden.

She looked at her mother's shocked face.

"I can't get dressed because you took my clothes," she explained. The more her mouth ran on its own, the more outrageous the things that seemed to spill out of her. For once, she surrendered and let herself speak. "Please give them back."

Her mother stood in the doorway. Alice found it almost comical how her mother's eyes blinked in rapid succession, like she was a robot who had been fed an unfamiliar command and was thrown into an infinite loop. "Kintarou-kun?" she said, as if she were unsure who she was speaking to. "Kintarou, what in the hell has gotten into you?"

But it wasn't about what had gotten into her. It wasn't about anything that had been added to her at all—rather, something that had been there before had very abruptly gone missing. Alice could feel the emptiness of it very clearly now, and it seemed that her mother could as well.

Alice didn't say anything about it, though. She merely stared at her mother's face, at the edges of uncertainty that had begun to creep in. It was an expression that she had previously only seen her showing her father. It was the look of someone who had nothing left to hold onto, but was nonetheless grasping desperately, blindly, in an effort to preserve some semblance of control.

Then Alice thought that maybe she _had_ seen that face directed at her many times before, that maybe she had just been too terrified to notice the emptiness behind the threats. More than anything, her mother looked exhausted, and Alice suddenly realized what she could do to relieve her, to finally give her some rest after all this time.

She sat up straight. Her spine ached a little from the sudden alignment. It was only then that it struck her how much she had been slouching lately. "If you want me to get dressed," she said, "then give me my clothes." Her voice came out louder, more demanding somehow. She gestured towards the suit that had been thrown around in pieces throughout the room. "I'd rather be naked than wear _that_. So I'll be naked until you give me back my clothes." She dropped her hands onto the table with a thud and felt the cool moisture of the spilled tea that still hadn't yet dried. She looked her mother directly in the eyes.

Her mother had stepped back, hanging onto the door frame with one hand, a look of complete astonishment on her face. She said nothing, only stared at Alice as if it were the first time she had ever seen her.

And maybe it was.


	15. Chapter 15: Cherry Blossoms Epilogue

**Chapter 15: Cherry Blossoms / Epilogue**

 _Sakura_ flowers rained down from the heavens above them in droves, like little floating pink umbrellas. They littered the ground in a carpet of rose-colored petals, and it gave Yumi the strange sensation that the cherry blossom trees were congratulating them, throwing sweet-smelling confetti on their heads.

In the distance, she could just barely see Maria-sama gazing at the students who walked past. Today, Yumi thought, that statue seemed to have a smile on her face. Then again, it may have just been the celebratory mood that gave her that impression, the relief that came with the first few days of the new term.

"So you made it through your first year unscathed," a smooth voice murmured from below. As was often the case, Sei seemed to read her mind—or perhaps it was that she was now well-practiced at deciphering Yumi's many expressions with an exacting precision.

Yumi looked down at her lap and smiled and continued to pick cherry blossom petals out of Sei's hair. It was futile though—the flowers kept coming, one after the other, a bittersweet gift from the garden that surrounded them. They were lazing about directly underneath a tree, Yumi's back against the rough bark of the trunk, Sei lying in a carefree heap on a bed of grass and cherry petals with her head in Yumi's lap. The sun was bathing them in patches of white light that filtered through the branches.

Yumi picked up a nearby cherry blossom from the ground and deliberately placed it on Sei's nose. "I wouldn't say I'm unscathed, exactly," Yumi replied in a joking tone, "but yes, you're right, I made it. _You_ made it, too." She chuckled a little when she saw that Sei was too lazy to lift her arm and brush the petal off her face, and instead was attempting to blow it off unsuccessfully.

But then Yumi's smile faded a bit. "You're a fourth year university student now," Yumi mumbled.

She still wasn't quite sure how she felt about it. The last couple of weeks of wrapping up the term and frying her brain with exams had indeed been a challenge, especially after all of the distractions and drama that had preceded it, but none of those things had been as uncomfortable as considering the reality that Sei would be leaving Lillian in less than a year—and for good.

"I don't know what I'll do when you're not here anymore, Sei-sama." This sensation of dread in her chest was very familiar. She remembered vividly that she had faced it years before, when Sei's graduation from Lillian Academy was imminent. While she had been relieved at the time to learn that Sei would be continuing her schooling just on the other side of the fence, now she felt like they had only been delaying the inevitable.

Sei seemed to realize what she was thinking before she even said it. She lifted a hand and pressed it to the side of Yumi's face. "Hey, I still have a whole year left. And even after that, I'll still be around town. I'm not moving abroad or anything."

"Your English is good. You could live anywhere you want."

"Right now, I want to live here—and anything other than _right now_ isn't real, anyway. It would just be pointless speculation."

Sei lifted her head from Yumi's lap and shifted her weight onto her elbow. She was still stretched out lazily, but her face had moved a little closer and she had rolled into a very bright patch of sunlight that fell through a space in the branches.

Yumi was mildly astonished to find that she could see the ghost of a few freckles on Sei's face. She had never seen them before—but then a gust of wind picked up all of a sudden and blew the branches around and shifted the light, so after a moment they seemed to disappear like a mirage. She found it so strange that after years of staring at that face, she still did not seem to know it all that well.

But every new mystery and every new discovery that she made about Satou Sei was precious to her, in part because she wasn't sure how long they would be able to sit like this together. Yumi's breath hitched. She looked down at Sei, a flood of emotion filling her chest, a flood of gratitude.

 _She's right,_ Yumi thought. _Right now, we're here, sitting together. Right now, I have a beautiful woman who endlessly delights me and endlessly frustrates me._

Some part of her could still hardly believe it. Only months before, she would never have suspected even for a second that the thread of life would have pulled them in that direction. For awhile, she had fought the urge to even define what they had—and she still thought that there was no way she could begin to label it—but the rest of the world slowly caught onto them and seemed hell-bent on definitions anyway. A few times now, in random hallways, she had overheard someone referring to her as "Satou-san's girlfriend." Sei herself had not corrected any of them. Yumi, similarly, had quietly submitted to the title with amusement.

She wasn't sure what it meant to be Satou Sei's girlfriend, but she was perfectly content making it up as she went along. This seemed to be Sei's strategy, too.

For awhile longer, they sat underneath the bath of cherry blossoms in silence, enjoying the presence of the moment, allowing themselves to do what typical lovers did. A few girls who passed by gave them knowing smiles, a kind of congratulations, Yumi thought.

There was one figure, though, that Yumi noticed at the corner of her eye. At first, she hardly paid any attention, preferring to concentrate on running her fingers down the silky threads of Sei's hair, but when she realized that the figure in the distance wasn't moving, she looked up.

Down the row of cherry blossoms, many meters away, far enough that she could only just make out her face, stood the short, skinny frame of a rather cute girl. She was wearing a flower in her ear-length hair and most of her body was swallowed up by a blue sweater that seemed too big for her. Her pink skirt matched the color of the blossoms.

She was standing awkwardly against the trunk of a _sakura_ tree—not leaning, exactly, only pressing lightly against it, as if she were anticipating that she might need the support in some undefined future. Her hands were clasped bashfully in front of her. She was staring straight at Yumi.

"It looks like you have a visitor," Yumi whispered. She gave Sei a tentative smile. This, too, was something she wasn't quite sure how to feel about. She liked the girl—she really did—but there were only so many times that she was willing to watch her mess with Sei's emotions, even if unintentionally.

They had not seen or heard from Alice for weeks. This hadn't seemed to bother Sei at all, though. It appeared that she had let go of her expectations completely, had undergone some kind of transformation that she never explained. Yumi had been partly surprised, and partly not surprised at all to learn that Sei had proposed to Alice at the _omiai_. It was one of those crazy things that Sei had done on a whim that nonetheless made total sense.

And yet, from what she could see, Alice had not had the good sense to say yes. Perhaps Yumi only saw it that way because she herself couldn't imagine ever saying no to a marriage proposal from Satou Sei. If Sei had looked up and asked her that very minute, she would not have hesitated—she would have immediately accepted, doubts and all. She was more sure about it than she had been when Sachiko held up her rosary in front of Maria-sama so many years before.

"Mm?" Sei asked. But then she noticed the far-off direction of Yumi's gaze and she turned around to match it. To Yumi's surprise, a brief chuckle burst through Sei. "Ah, so there she is." She said this very flatly, as if she were expecting Alice to show up at some point, as if the girl had been very late for some important meeting.

"Did you have a date?" Yumi asked her.

"Oh, no, no. Not at all. I just figured we'd run into her eventually. Call it fate."

"You're too sure of yourself."

"Always."

Yumi gave her a wry smile and poked her in the shoulder. "What are you going to do, then? Talk to her? Ignore her?"

"Oh that's up to her," Sei said, laying her head back down on Yumi's lap. "There's only so much I can do. If she has come to me with her answer, then I'll hear it—but that's just it, she'll have to come to me now."

Yumi felt herself let go of some tension she hadn't realized she was holding in her body. Something about Sei's ever-present nonchalant attitude could relax her in seconds. She looked back down at Sei's face, studying the lines, letting her gaze wander from those bright and mischievous eyes to that insufferable smirk.

Not long after, Yumi thought to look up again, and sure enough, the girl had reappeared only a few trees away. She could see her face more clearly now. It was clouded with uncertainty, with nervous apprehension.

Yumi thought to herself that this was quite enough. She gave Sei a look, but Sei seemed to already know.

Without turning to face her or even moving at all, Sei called out, "You're wearing my sweater, Alice. It makes you look like a sad little blue bunny rabbit. Have you come all the way here to return it?"

Alice blushed.

Finally, Sei seemed to muster up the compassion to turn around. She shifted onto the front of her body and propped herself up on her folded elbows. "Come here."

Alice wordlessly took a few steps forward, then stopped. She was still at an uncomfortable speaking distance, but close enough that she couldn't easily hide from them anymore. This appeared to satisfy Sei enough that she rolled onto her feet, an array of moist petals sticking to the back of her shirt.

Yumi watched as Sei walked the last few paces forward and came to stand underneath one of the other nearby cherry blossom trees with Alice. For some strange reason, Yumi suddenly recalled something that her Onee-sama had told her weeks before: Relationships rarely happened between only two people at a time. The barriers were an illusion.

Sei could not simply walk underneath a neighboring _sakura_ and leave Yumi behind, just as Sei could not sit unwaveringly underneath the tree with Yumi and ignore Alice's presence. All three of them were wandering openly in a vast garden, forever connected, always affecting each other.

Sei stood in front of Alice, her lanky figure hovering over the younger girl, shielding her a bit from the petals. Nonetheless, the cherry blossoms rained lightly on the both of them.

"I haven't come to return anything," Alice whispered, though Yumi was close enough to hear her clearly. "I don't want to give any of it back."

Sei stared at her with an enigmatic look that even Yumi could not decipher at first. "Then I take it you've decided," Sei said after a moment.

When Alice nodded, Sei took her hand. She led her down the last bit of the path until they were sharing the same shelter as Yumi. Yumi looked up to see Sei smiling down at her, her upper body framed by the sky and the branches above. She extended a hand towards Yumi as well. Without question or even a second of consideration, Yumi took it.

The initial jolt was jarring—it always was when it came to Sei—but Yumi was able to keep up the pace easily this time. She allowed Sei to pull her up and she tightened her grip on Sei's hand as the inevitable whistling of the wind began to play in her ears.

The world became a blur as they ran. Sei dashed through the maze of trees, weaved through thickets of bushes, stomped all over the cherry blossoms like she had lost all sense of respect—or perhaps she simply respected the petals too much to treat them with too much caution. They nearly slipped several times, but they kept running and Yumi's heart kept beating faster as she watched the lean muscles of Sei's back flexing with the effort and joy of freedom, with the balanced tension that came from pulling hard with both her hands.

Yumi looked to her left and found that someone else was running beside her. A bewildered girl in a blue sweater was similarly holding onto Sei's arm for dear life. Yumi laughed.

She had no idea where they were going, none at all. But deep inside, she knew that it hardly mattered. She would follow Satou Sei anywhere.

* * *

 _END of Metamorphosis_

* * *

 _A/N:_

 _Whooo! So I finished the story in a caffeine-fueled rage over the past few days. If you care for that sort of thing, stay tuned for entirely unnecessary author's notes that I will add to the end of the story, explaining a few things like what inspired the story, why I chose Sei/Yumi and Sei/Alice as pairings to explore, what some of the references to the Marimite novels are, and a bit more about the themes that are heavily explored in this story._

 _Thanks for going on this journey with me! As always, let me know what you think!_


	16. Author's Notes, Story Behind the Story

**Author's Notes / Story Behind the Story**

 _[As a quick aside, I will probably be trying my hand at an original yuri-esque work soon. It will be under a different pen name, so feel free to PM me or email me (endofabraxas at gmail DOT com) if you want me to let you know when I do.]_

This is not an actual chapter (since the story is now finished). This is the part where I pompously talk about the story that you just read, if you're into that. It's some commentary on the themes, on the _Maria-sama ga Miteru_ novels, and on what inspired this weird little tale. That kind of thing. I'll try to keep it as brief as I can, but when it comes to _Marimite_ , there's a lot to talk about.

 _Metamorphosis_ is a story about Sei, mostly. There are other characters having similar growth experiences, but they are ultimately interwoven with Sei's story, and Sei is the catalyst for many of the other characters.

Originally, this was meant as a one-shot. At first, I just thought it would be funny if Sei flirted with Alice, not realizing who she was messing with. Before long, though, I realized that something like that would be hard for Sei to just brush off, considering her history….

 **Why Sei and Alice? What the Heck?**

The first thing that I want to address is the most obvious: Why Sei/Alice, of all the possible pairings?

Weeelll, a few reasons:

1) I hadn't seen any other Sei/Alice stories (probably for good reason; at first blush, it's just a weird, random pairing that has no canon background), and I thought it would be cool to give it a try. Actually I haven't seen any Alice/Anyone stories, though I may have just missed them.

2) It would be interesting to see Sei in a situation where she, for once, was the speechless one who had no idea what to do. Uncertainty is the first step towards growth in a character, and _Marimite_ is all about character development and growth. It was an opportunity for Sei to question herself, and exploring her psyche is interesting to me because she's one of the deeper personalities in the series.

3) Alice was kind of an underused character in the series, whom I found interesting for a number of reasons. Usually the point of any story is (inner and outer) conflict, and often people who are highly unusual—for example, trans people—tend to be at the center of a lot of conflict and resistance from society. Alice and Sei have this in common (not just because Sei is more or less openly gay, but because she bucks many other social norms), and I could see them bonding over it. In some ways, they could also both challenge each other in a way other characters could not.

Originally, the story was going to develop along very different lines. My focus was going to be about Sei questioning her sexuality after being attracted to Alice, but when I really thought about it and began to write Chapter 2, it became clear to me that this was simply out of character for Sei.

The way I see it, Sei's the type of person who would not really care too much if she was attracted to a trans girl, at least not enough to have any kind of deep identity crisis. Even though she questioned her sexuality during her affair with Shiori in the novels (and even appeared to come to the conclusion over time that she was probably homosexual), that was more out of self-discovery and trying to make sense of unfamiliar feelings than out of a need to attach herself to a label.

For the most part, Sei appears to simply accept her sexuality as part of life and doesn't tie her identity much into it. This is probably partly due to her culture and partly due to her character. So after thinking about it for awhile, I realized that the biggest issue when it came to her sexuality was not that she was gay, but rather that she was _still_ not completely over the trauma of losing Shiori.

In the series, she's happy and moves on with her life for the most part, but it's also clear that she's still a bit scarred by the experience and that it affects her romantic life. (It could just be me, but she seems to tread way too lightly with Katou Kei, a character whom she's obviously attracted to in the novels.) I started wondering about the kind of demons that would be triggered if Sei started to fall in love with someone like Alice very hard and very quickly like she had with Shiori.

To make matters worse (or better conflict-wise), Alice would have her own set of baggage that Sei would have to tip-toe around. For example, many people do not accept Alice the way she is, but Sei does, which would immediately put Sei at odds with people like Alice's parents.

Alice does not have the courage to be who she is fully at the start of the story, though, which is a huge rift between her and Sei. There is also the body dysphoria that usually comes with being trans, which was addressed briefly in the 7th chapter, and became a barrier to intimacy between them, which Sei struggled to not take personally.

So, long story short, I thought that Sei and Alice could really push each other over the edge of the things that were holding them both back. They each had a strong potential for hurting the other in a unique way. They could push each other's buttons.

 **Sei, Shiori, Shimako...and Alice**

Sei's journey with Alice intentionally mirrors the journey she had with Shiori and Shimako, albeit loosely.

She meets all three of these girls and feels an attraction to them basically instantly. She goes through a short period of resistance, and then breaks down and throws her feelings on them (which was especially the case with Shiori). And in the case of Alice and Shimako, they both accept Sei's proposal very soon after first meeting her, during the spring, under the cherry blossoms.

These relationships are way too quick to be sensible, and are instead rather intuitive, which is how Sei lives her life. She's rarely the kind of person who takes a slow, simmering approach, and this theme shows up again and again in her connections to other people.

Often, we tend to repeat painful experiences—like a karmic cyle—until we learn what we have to learn and resolve them. Usually, this means facing some kind of fear.

I wanted Sei to eventually reach a point where she would have to face her fear of rejection and abandonment, one where she could not use disinterest and aloofness as a shield. She faced a fear with Shimako—one that had to do with bringing the women she loved down from some untouchable pedestal, I think (Sei had a killer Madonna-Whore Complex for awhile)—but that still left a few more demons for her to examine in herself.

Sei resists Alice almost from the very beginning because something tells her to be afraid. Probably, this was because she sensed intuitively that she would want to marry this person, even if she could not articulate it in her mind until towards the end of the story.

(Yep, the whole marriage part of the arc was planned fairly early on. I heavily alluded to it a few times, if you caught it. And because I'm so heavy-handed and like to beat you over the head with irony, I couldn't resist having Sei propose to Alice at an _omiai_ that wasn't even hers, hahaha.)

 **Sei and Yumi**

It could just be that I'm a fan of Sei/Yumi, so I have a huge bias here, but to me Sei/Yumi is one of the most realistic pairings in the _Marimite_ series, in terms of the potential to develop into an actual adult relationship, so I really wanted to explore it. Sei and Yumi's connection during the series is the most overtly physical one out of all of the members of the Yamayurikai, and there's no explicit reason for them to be so close because they're not _soeurs_. Yumi isn't even as physical with Sachiko as she is with Sei. (In the novels, Sei is even more touchy-feely with Yumi than in the anime and frequently manhandles her.)

This made me wonder what sex would be like between them once they were at an age where that could reasonably happen. I didn't want it to devolve into fapping material here, but I did want to bring what they had to its "logical" (in my biased mind) extreme. I thought it would also be interesting to see Sei use this experience as a tool to guide Yumi out of her comfort zone, rather than to comfort her after her falling out with Sachiko. (Sei waits until Yumi has resolved her conflict with Sachiko before she sleeps with her, and she also gives Yumi no choice but to be the one to ask for it.)

It was one of the harder parts to write, though, to be honest.

 **Which Way Does** **Sachiko** **Swing?**

As an aside, I'm like 90% sure that the Sachiko of the canon series is 99% straight. She certainly has a borderline romantic relationship with Yumi, and if she were to go gay for anyone, it would be for her, but none of her relationships with women seem the least bit sexual (even the one she has with Yumi).

Still, for this story, she needed to be at least a little bit bi, so she was. Her indiscretions just seemed to make more sense if they were homosexual in nature, since these are easier to get away with because they fly under the radar (and Sachiko could also more easily flex her status over another woman than over a man). I suppose this doesn't make her necessarily not straight, but it probably does.

I also left it open who this distant cousin was whom Sachiko slept with. One person comes immediately to mind (you know who), but I didn't want to go there, so I didn't. (That would be a whole other story.) That person is also conspicuously absent from this story, and I'm not sure why, either.

 **Polygamy and the Ambiguity of Labels**

As referenced several times in the story, I decided to depict Sei as non-monogamous and quite shameless about it. There are a few labels for this behavior in the Western world, but again Sei is doing this out of instinct more than any kind of self-aware decision. There's not a lot of evidence about her stance on this in the canon, but I could see her going either way.

The reason I wrote it this way is because it mirrors the _soeur_ relationships in _Marimite_ , which I wanted to explore a bit. If you think about it, they are by nature polygamous. You usually have one "older sister" and one "younger sister," and they may both compete for your attention.

While the _soeur_ relationship does have boundaries to it that echo that of a marriage (you are allowed only a limited amount of partners), it is also a bit looser. In the series, occasional "cheating" happened fairly openly. Even Yumi philandered with Sei sometimes, and Sachiko was entirely aware of it.

This had been the pattern of Sei and Yumi's relationship for years—a deep friendship without the confines of a social system (almost the opposite of what Yumi has with Sachiko), along with a slightly sexual edge—so I saw no reason why that part would need to change.

In the end, it simply matured into an adult relationship that also had no expectations and did not adhere to social norms. They do passively accept other people's labels for them, but in practice they do not obey the boxes. (Sei does this as well in her proposed marriage to Alice. She makes it clear to the point of absurdity that Alice will be unable to play the safe "husband" role, and that the marriage would likely make Alice lose face, even if she would gain a lot of freedom in return.)

I actually got a lot of feedback about this non-monogamous aspect in particular while writing the story. Some people just did not like it at all and wanted Sei to choose one person or the other (usually Yumi).

 **Pain and Unconditional Love**

One of the things that Sei resisted as a youngster was the unconditional love of the people around her (like her best friend Youko), which she viewed as intrusive. During the _Marimite_ series, part of Sei's journey is to get over this, and she becomes much more open post-Shiori.

Unconditional love is kind of a paradox. It can actually be very painful to a person who isn't prepared to receive it; it can be a burden. Many times, people resist love that comes without judgment or conditions (or are suspicious of it) because they don't love themselves enough to feel worthy of it. Other times, they might be hurt because someone they love in a "special," closed-off way accepts and loves many other people indiscriminately. (Or they love Maria-sama more, in the case of Shiori.) I thought this would be interesting to explore.

In the story, Sei alludes to this in her first conversation with Alice, in which she vaguely mentions how she rejected Youko because she wasn't prepared at the time to be loved for who she was. Sachiko also makes reference to this in the chapel, when she accuses Sei of being too unconditional with how she loves people, telling her that it was causing Yumi pain.

 **It Takes a Yuri Village**

Another theme that I couldn't help but mercilessly beat into the poor reader (for some reason; I don't know why) is the fact that human relationships do not take place in a vacuum. In fact, that's the single most prominent theme in the story. (It's also a common theme in _Marimite_ itself, in my interpretation.)

Almost all of the relationships in the story are interwoven and rely on each other. Sei's relationship to Yumi helped her give Sachiko advice about how to fix Sachiko and Yumi's broken connection. Sachiko goes out of her way to help Sei find Alice again, and she also—oddly enough—helps to nudge Yumi into a relationship with Sei once she is able to accept that there are certain things that she can't give to Yumi.

In a similar way, Yumi's compassion for Kawakami is what eventually indirectly allows Sei access to Alice's house one last time, even after Sei had managed to offend everyone around her (including Kawakami).

In other words, "we're all connected." This is a theme that flies in the face of Sei's deepest relationship problems. The single biggest issue in her relationship with Shiori was not that it was homosexual or that it went against social norms—it was that Sei cut herself off from everyone around her. If she had not done that, they might have actually had a chance.

In this story, I wanted to see her get over that finally, and reach for the other extreme—one of complete vulnerability and openness.

...

Anyway, so yeah. If you made it this far, thanks for reading my ramblings!


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